

How to detect a page request from Safari 4's Top Sites feature - mattking
http://www.sunpig.com/martin/archives/2010/01/08/how-to-detect-a-page-request-from-safari-4s-top-sites-feature.html

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patio11
_More importantly, Google might consider this cloaking, and come round your
house in the middle of the night with a baseball bat._

No, they won't. Google's definition of cloaking is serving different results
to Googlebot versus end-users.

For one thing, neither nor GoogleBot nor the remote quality raters will be
sending Safari-specific headers for discovery/evaluation tasks, so they won't
see the preview at all. For another, this falls into the (sort of) nebulous
category of "cloaking designed to enhance the user experience", which is
almost always kosher.

Similar examples: you can auto-detect someone's region/language/browser/etc
and customize the page to fit their needs, and Google is pretty much OK with
that as long as you treat Googlebot the same way.

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thwarted
This vaguely reminds me of that (was it Internet Explorer?) plugin/extension
that tried to detect phishing sites by prefetching all the links on a page.
There was a big uproar with admins and there was an apache rewrite rule
floating around to detect the user-agent and block these requests.

I can't remember the name of this, though, so I'm having trouble searching for
it. Maybe 2006 or 2007 was the time?

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mmelin
You're sure you're not thinking of Google's Web Accelerator? It wasn't made to
prevent phishing, but to speed up browsing, but it caused the problems you
describe.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator>

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thwarted
I am sure I am not thinking of GWA. I want to say it was installed somewhat
implicitly as part of some virus checking software that people didn't really
ask for.

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aniketh
This was AVG antivirus link checker

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thwarted
Ah, that it was, that's what I was thinking of. Thanks.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVG_(software)#Concerns>

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Imprecate
That's actually really useful info. If someone visits your site enough to be
in their top sites, it's probably a sign that they like it a lot.

~~~
petercooper
Back in the day when IE first implemented favicon.ico, it was common to track
your logs for favicon.ico loads since they'd only be loaded when someone added
your site to their Favorites. Sadly that doesn't work anymore :-(

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onewland
One useful way to take advantage of this might be to just serve your site at a
lower resolution if the HTTP header is defined to reduce bandwidth use. If
you're using 500px wide banner images on a 1000px grid, size that down for the
Safari preview but scale everything so that it's still representative of your
site.

~~~
sailormoon
One would think that the time it would take to implement that would be far
more than could ever be conceivably saved by bandwidth reductions, except for
perhaps the very largest sites.

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jrockway
I can't wait until this becomes more popular. Then I can send this header and
avoid tracking + ads without any additional software.

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windsurfer
I think this is an awesome idea. It's like a bigger favicon that's actually
useful.

