Forum Moderators: open
Anytime a Navigator user performs a search by typing terms into the browser's URL bar and pressing the adjacent Search button, or by using the Search tab on the browser's My Sidebar feature, the user data is sent to a server at info.netscape.com using a uniform resource locator (URL) forwarding system.
AOL gets users' search terms, IP, the date Navigator was installed and a unique ID. Works only with NS 6.
If it is a completely unique id, then they can trace that back to a name, address and other information if that consumer registered the product. That is a *lot* of information.
It makes me wonder if this is an experiment for designs to be incorporated into the newest AOL browser. Think of the money to be made by selling all this marketing information to the highest bidder.
It also brings to light another point Brett made earlier.
How would the search engines react to having people complain about search term information being sent back to Company X? Easy.
They would use this as a 'legitimate' reason to change their forms from get to post to eliminate search terms from being sent in the url in log files. [webmasterworld.com]
<really wound up>
Think how Google, the PR king of all search engines, would toot their horn. "At Google, we want to make sure your search terms are private. So we are changing how our search engine works to prevent these terms from being seen by anyone but you. Bla bla bla."
</really wound up>
(edited by: grnidone at 3:52 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2002)
For more details check out [mozilla.org...]
