Netscape.com Search - Click Tracking through Google?

Looking through logs, seems to lead to the possibility.

[Eric_Lander]

I may be way off track here - may be completely wrong.

But, from what I have seen to a particular site of mine, I am seeing what looks to be a level of clik-popularity monitoring.

Has anyone else seen this through Netscape recently? I may have missed it though, since there aren't a significant level of referrals coming from Netscape.

Oh, and what I found within a VERY long URL referral in the logs included the following:

_http://search.netscape.com/redir.adp?appname=MS&query=__SEARCHTERM__&url=__URL__&datasource=Google
&partner=Google&clickedItemRank=3&requestId=cns39683&component=websearch.google.http.tcl&searchType=MS&brand=NSCP&query=__SEARCH TERM__&view=nscp_portal&channel=nscp_portal&source=NSCPResults&invocationType=-"

[edited by: NFFC at 8:46 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2002]

[NFFC]

I don't know why but Netscape seem obsessed with tracking. I use NS6, type a search term in the address bar and it searches Google, it all goes through Netscape first though.

[mbauser2]

I may be way off track here - may be completely wrong.

You may be jumping the gun and forgetting Occam's Razor. Netscape has tracking linkgs, so the simplest answer is that Netscape wants to do click-tracking. As NFFC said, Netscape uses redirection to track most (in not all) of their outgoing links. For example, you can see tracking URLs in the CNN stories on the netscape.com homepage.

You'll find it's pretty normal for sites that license search engine databases to do click-tracking, because they want to make sure they're getting they're money's worth. (In fact, some sites may be paying on a sliding scale that requires them to measure their traffic.)

Go snooping through Hotbot results, for example, and you'll see tracking IDs that identify which results are Intkomi-derived, and which are from Direct Hit.