sneaky AV

[PeteU]

scooter and babelfish now come from same IP

[littleman]

Thanks for the heads up, and thank you NFFC for pointing me to this thread.
Those dirty rotten scoundrels! How much do you want to bet that they will start spidering from the same IP as Mozilla? So now we have effectively the same game as google's cache. It hasn't stopped anyone from cloaking to google. It can't be in AV's long term interest to have their algorithm exposed like that unless they push on-page criteria to meaningless levels.

[pete]

Hmmmm - could be a new ball game with AV!

Pete, have you got some log entries and IP's we could look at?

Thanks!

[Brett_Tabke]

Well for Pete's sake (oops, sorry guys - we have about as many Pete's around here as we do RC's)

Off to do the babelfishy surfing...see ya in a month ;-)

[PeteU]

Come on Pete you're not new to this :) its all in the first message..
Hmm, bit of a dillema what to do about this, most likely nothing, I cloak to hide the ugliness of doorpages not how they are build, its all in the links nowadays, few will know how to use this to snoop anyway.
Brett, good luck maybe you'll find a gem!

[littleman]

>gems
I got a couple already.

[pete]

The one Petes a bonehead! Ill have a cup of coffee and wake up b4 I post next time! ;)

[jeremy goodrich]

I did, too. :)

Littleman, if you want I can email you something interesting...but I'm willing to bet you already have the ones I took.

We could do a swap, if you want...I'm interested in a variety of styles, not a quantity of the same, and that's about all I've been able to get. So far. :)

I have to admit, between the weird submittal code, and now this, AV is really treating me well. Really well. If only their user base would return, I think they just might have something there.

Jeremy, the artist formerly known as Han Solo

[jeremy goodrich]

How's this for a conspiracy theory? (the following is speculation, don't read if you don't want to become more paranoid.)

AV did this on purpose, so that all of the optimizers would run and go grab stuff that was being cloaked by ip and or ua...I haven't yet checked to see if the UA is scooter, or if it is just the IP that is the same as their bot.

Then, they start logging and checking like crazy the stuff that gets "translated" for this period. And now they have a who's who list of the best, brightest optimizers...because everybody was all too anxious to grabbed the cloaked content from the competition.

Then all they have to do is filter out these people and poof...the best way yet they've come up with to filter stuff from their db.

I'd love to hear some points, counter points to this.

Jeremy,

The artist formerly known as Han Solo

[Brett_Tabke]

Obfuscate. Feed bogus stuff to any babelfish scooters yet will kill their rankings if they steal it ;-)

[PeteU]

conspiracy? nah, but with all recent changes in AV, I can't help but feel they hired or consulted someone with SEO/SEspam background, sort of "hire a hacker to check security" stuff..

[volatilegx]

I'm working on an algorithm for solving this problem but I have a question. Does the User Agent for Scooter ALWAYS contain the string "scooter" (case is irrelevent) ? Anybody have any history on this?

[PeteU]

no, AV used plain mozilla (mibs) as well as others like libwww-perl/5.xx etc
but it seems they _are_ sticking to scooter name for the time being.
By checking both ip and ua 99% of snoopers should be eliminated, those who know how to get thru would be wasting their time looking at my stuff anyway ;)

[volatilegx]

Thanks PeteU