what the ggpht?

[lucy24]

74.125.186.44 - - [03/Oct/2012:16:20:08 -0700] "GET /hovercraft/words/tutiktut.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 27456 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7 (via ggpht.com)"

And that was all she wrote.

Assiduous g##ing tells me that ggpht.com has something to do with images. This I think I could have worked out on my own. It also points me to this longago thread [webmasterworld.com], though I'm ggphted if I can figure out why.*

I am similarly ggphted if I can see why a search for the above keyword does not bring up my site-- a fact that worried me so much, I had to search for a unique phrase from the same page to reassure myself that I still exist. But that's a different forum.


* But I don't mind, because the thread offers the line

i can only conclude that most people who steal images are stupid.

illustrating once again that some things never change. Myspace and its kin may come and go, but hotlinkers will always be with us.

[dstiles]

As noted before, I have the whole of 125 blocked as being a "bad neighbourhood". Firefox 3.0 would have blown it anyway, of course. :)

[lucy24]

Firefox 3.0 would have blown it anyway, of course.

Most of my blocks-- except for the top-level CIDR list-- are constrained to page requests so the server doesn't have to check over and over again when someone's reading a picture book with 50 separate image files. This works handsomely 99% of the time. Here of course is the other 1%. The absence of a referer means that it also bypassed the hotlink block.

Apart from the faviconbot, most of my 74.125. is Translate which in my case tends to be legitimate.

:: detour to re-check notes ::

Preview; Wireless Transcoder; urlresolver; faviconbot (no UA); Rich Snippets

Someone hereabouts once figured out what urlresolver is, but I forget. The favicon and Rich Snippets are, I think, used only by GWT.

Still waiting to figure out what ggpht is ;) The "ggpht.com" name belongs to google but the site doesn't seem to exist.

[keyplyr]

Someone hereabouts once figured out what urlresolver is

It's one of several url resolvers :)

e.g. It takes a condensed url, example: bit.ly/lChNA, and resolves it to the original url www.webmasterworld .