A couple of months ago we published our concerns regarding the search results returned by search engines. One of the drawback of search engines today is that during a search they do not filter the results according the user's security settings. Such settings may include blocking cookies, blocking jscriptts, active scripting and flash. So for instance first we block cookies and jscripts with our browser. Then if we search for "rent movies" we get plenty of related topics from search engines. As we start clicking each one of those we see one that mentions "we need to enable cookies" another shows some irrelevant content because everything runs in flash, the we get pages which are blank and so on. This reminds of times when sites were configured to be viewed with a specific browser. Our argument is that search engines should check the user browser's settings before returning the results.Once these settings are identified the related results can be returned.
For security reasons many visitors want to have active scripting disabled as they browse the web. Initially at least. Then if the site content is interesting enough for what they're looking for and assuming they trust the site's content, they may allow scripts. People do become aware of the security issues cookies and jscripts may cause and today there are plenty of plugins for many browsers to control in many ways active scripting. If you are using Firefox you could check the characteristics of the noscript plugin. In addition is fairly easy with this browser and without using add-ons to control the cookies behavior. Having the default action on cookies to be disabled, the user can safely browse the internet and selectively accept cookies by using the exception list on Firefox. IE has similar options under the privacy and security tabs. Same goes for the Opera and Safari browsers. So at present the user will go back and forth to get to the next result for his search which is tedious and time-consuming. There is information that circulates regarding search engines and attempts to parse active content. Well it seems to be a new era of keywords and web-content manipulation. Without a standard or an official spec and with cryptic announcements parsing active content and identify its real purpose will prove to be next to impossible. Web-sites should always deploy a noscript alternative for each script element. From their point to view they do need more customers to achieve more sales and better exposure. There are lots of search engines that do not process scripts at all. Active scripting is vague as a concept. For example a web-page may contain a popup window of an image within a jscript function. A search engine would really need more than a de-compiler to process the proper information. In this example the recorded result will be useless to both search engines and customers/visitors. Regular visitors should be aware that client-side scripts as described in this document are executed on their browser and inside their computer. Sensitive information thay may transmit at any time is subject to these security settings. Going from site-A to site-B does not mean the information transmitted is secure. Remember that compromised systems can transmit all sorts of information that is stored in a computer. Our view is that search engines should restrict exposure of sites who cannot service real visitors regardless of browser settings. To us a sole use of active content is intentional misinformation with unfriendly content. Checkout our other entries of blogs as well as our services so you can see the alternative we propose and integrated for e-commerce stores. In general regular visitors may choose to reduce the effectiveness of spam that is posed by jscript redirection methods by disabling active content. Currently authors of popular browsers, insist, on having active content enabled with the installation of browser packages whilst spammers take advantage of it. |
