The TrustRank Mention Within G's Safe Browsing FF Extension

I just noticed this

[caveman]

Late last year G came out with a FF extension called Safe Browsing. To be honest I did not pay much attention.

But I was looking at some redirection code the other day, and got this:

----------------------------------------------------------

ht*p://redirectedsite.com/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: redirectedsite.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 05:51:37 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Unix) PHP/4.4.2 mod_ssl/2.0.54 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 DAV/2 SVN/1.1.4
Location: ht*p://www.targetsite.com/
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 194
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

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ht*p://sb.google.com/safebrowsing/lookup?sourceid=firefox-antiphish&features=TrustRank&client=navclient-auto-tbff&encver=1&nonce=
1632261528&wrkey=MTrO_pDuxUFoegtmix-b842z&encparams=h9zD1O8zfqpAnabMrmCvbCmIW4W47cT4yfym3ZQSvLA571s=

GET /safebrowsing/lookup?sourceid=firefox-antiphish&features=TrustRank&client=navclient-auto-tbff&encver=1&nonce=1632261528&wrkey=
MTrO_pDuxUFoegtmix-b842z&encparams=h9zD1O8zfqpAnabMrmCvbCmIW4W47cT4yfym3ZQSvLA571s= HTTP/1.1

Host: sb.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain

Server: TrustRank Frontend

Content-Length: 0
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 05:51:37 GMT

----------------------------------------------------------

ht*p://www.targetsite.com/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.targetsite.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 05:51:37 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_throttle/3.1.2 DAV/1.0.3 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.4.2 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
Last-Modified: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 22:32:19 GMT
Etag: "659718-25c-442c5c73"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 376

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ht*p://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&features=Rank&client=navclient-auto-ff&ch=804118d90&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.targetsite.com%2F
GET /search?sourceid=navclient-ff&features=Rank&client=navclient-auto-ff&ch=804118d90&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.targetsite.com%2F HTTP/1.1
Host: toolbarqueries.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=a71dcf333ddbc2bd:TM=1152683498:LM=1152683498:S=0CM-12fARbk4WqCn; expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Server: GWS/2.1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 05:51:38 GMT

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Now, to be clear, the FF safe browsing extension isn't news. It has been around since late last year. But I never really bothered to look under the hood. So now that I'm awake and paying attention, I thought it might be interesting to re-call attention to it, since I don't remember much discussion on the subject.

It's no secret that I'm a long time believer in G using some variation of the thinking behind LR/TR in their algos. We talked a lot about site level evaluation by Google, after the Allegra Update. Here [webmasterworld.com] for example.

What's interesting to me about this, is the overt use of the term "TrustRank" in association with Safe Browsing. It is perfectly logical that Safe Browsing data would be part of their mapping for TR (identifying the worst corners of the Web), so their use of the TR term in the string seems a rather casual acknowledgement of what's going on on a larger scale. Either that or it's just another misleading little ditty. But I doubt that.

Here's a link to the TrustRank paper (PDF) [webmasterworld.com], for those who've not had the chance to read it.

Like I said; no news here. Just something I found interesting.