Wanted: Tool to con website into thinking I'm a search engine

- cloak hunting

[xy123]

I'd like to investigate whether some sites of interest to me use cloaked pages when they're visited by Googlebot etc.

I.e I'm after a tool that the receiving web server thinks is (e.g) googlebot, then replies with its cloaked page.

Any suggestions?

Or do they do it on IP address matching?

[Quinn]

Or do they do it on IP address matching?

If they don't they should. Otherwise spoof your user agent.

[hetzeld]

> Or do they do it on IP address matching?

Hi,

I guess that most of those sites must match the IP ranges, cause the browser id is too easy to fake...
If I remember well, Opera allows you to choose the id.
You may give it a try. ;)

Dan

[Chris_D]

Just use a SE supplied translator - eg go to eg Altavista & use Altavista babelfish - then the page request is coming from a search engine. Try it.

: )

Chris

[stevenha]

Chris_D, Thanks for an interesting suggestion! If this really works, wouldn't it be cool if other search engines offered that capability to users, as a way to check if sites are using cloaking.

Are there any other ways to tell, besides via Altavista?

[WebGuerrilla]

Translators will only catch newbie amateur cloakers. If they havw a clue about what they are doing, you won't be able to come up with any legal tool that will help you get their pages.

[volatilegx]

Most of the commercial scripts out there take translators into consideration... don't expect to bust through cloaking using a translator.

[saoi_jp]

wouldn't google cache view show you the cloaked version? (Of the last time google visited the site)

[ukgimp]

Try gigablasts cached version. More likely to turn up something with that tham with Googles as they may have not thought about it.

[chris_f]

That's right. I use the Google cache.

Chris

[amznVibe]

The Google viewer seems to show the cloaked version of pages to me, so this might be exactly what you are looking for (probably because it uses the google cache). Only problem is you cannot see the entire page unless you have a very high res monitor and put your IE into full screen mode (F11)

[labs.google.com...]

I often use it to scan groups of keywords to see what top sites are "playing games" to get their high rankings.