I was trying to remember what model my Netgear ADSL magic router thingy was since its playing up and so decided to search my site. Yeah, yeah, I could have just gone downstairs to read it off the box… but I’m tired and its late.
Anyhoo, my site search appears to broken, sigh! So I went to google and searched for “pauked netgear“. The first entry gave me what I was after, but the second link listed a site called urlfan.com, which appears to mirror the content of sites!
I’m not that bothered that the content of my site has been copied wholesale (since its mainly waffle) but it does annoy me that it links directly images on my site. I put a stop to their shenanigans by going into the site admin and turning Hotlink Protection on, which:
…prevents other websites from directly linking to files on your website. Other sites will still be able to link to any file type that you don’t specify below (ie. html files). An example of hotlinking would be using a <img> tag to display an image from your site from somewhere else on the net. The end result is that the other site is stealing your bandwidth.
Neato! Getting back to urlfan.com. Interesting site which apparently does the following (as quoted from the How It Works page):
://URLFAN is an evolving experiment designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time. It does this by cultivating the content of thousands of RSS feeds and parsing billions of pieces of information.
Now every website owner can see who’s talking about their site in real time and how they compare to every other site on the Internet. There are many sites designed to rank the “traffic” of a website, such as Alexa, however ://URLFAN is different. We rank sites according to their popularity in the fast moving and growing world of RSS feeds.
Ok, fine, so the concept is pretty cool, but why do they have to mirror the content of my site and many others? Isn’t it meant to rate site popularity? Very odd I thought and I’m not sure what to make of it.
Below are some example searches. Click on the Analysis links to get the full page views:
