Blackhat marketing - finding out your visitors' browser history
 

http://www.stevenyork.com/tutorial/g...ing_javascript

Stumbled upon this. A rather nifty way to find out if surfers have been at your competitors' sites :)

uhhhhhh.

wow why didnt i think of this,
i can think of some nefarious uses

like heres a really good one.

some sites track sales by cookies so the first user who sent a surfer to the site gets the sale.

I'm pretty sure livejasmin works like this. So if a user visited livejasmin but didnt signup , then they come to your site and signup thru your link you dont get paid. using this trick you could swap out the ads for something different if the surfer had already visited

Very good tool.

with all the else if echos, would it lag the load?

looks pretty cool.

im going to play with it.

There's this one too.

http://azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/

Would be cool to have a that kind of marketing data, questionable how ethical it is though.

Dont do it, its unethical!

lololllll

This wont work or give you accurate data if the user has a privacy manager set up with thier browser. I can set mine to clean up cookies, history, address bar, temp internet folder, autocomplete entries, index.dat, every 30 sec if I want.

But how many users do this? I personally wouldn't, I like using my history bar and having my cookies set for daily usability...

Yep, but how many people do this? Many, including me, do a cleanup on startup or shutdown and maybe if the browser is closed...every 30 secs is a little much paranoia :winkwink:

A lot of ISPs over here supply the whole package free when you subscribe to them and they also auto update the anti virus/ firewall/ popup blocker..ect software all the time for free . When a user signs up to say Virgin it is installed with the cd they give you. So I guess there are a lot of users who have installed it and dont even know what its for. But it is automatically set to delete the history every 30 min

Another wierd thing I found that mine does is it tells me everytime I log onto GFY that some script is running and it gives me the option of shutting the script down. Dont know if its something to do with the banners on here or something

doesn't google know all this and more using their toolbar?

now you can know too. lol

that's pretty smooth :thumbsup

Bookmarked.

Great stuff!

It sounds like he is saying, dell uses this to look at the history urls, then spider them for information, at which point they can customize advertisements / promotions based on your history. That would be sick and I want one.

At our level, tracking a return visitor sent to a sponsor - which return to your site, so you can show them a different advertisment, can be done with ad management software.

If you want to get Black Hat. Spam rankings, look at the browser history, show custom/new landing pages or join pages, based on where the visitor has already been. Or to go more, look to see if they have member history, and offer them a related site at a lower price.