NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> Re: Site abuse? What's a guy to do?
ONLINE-ADS>> Re: Site abuse? What's a guy to do?
Oliver Jones/VIVO (oj/VIVO.VIVO_at_vivo.com)
13 Oct 96 13:01:49 EDT
Hi, I'm chiming in to a discussion in which
Bob Wyman <bobwyman_at_healthgate.com> wrote:
> One of his services is a "Free Medline" search...
> While he's got his own search form up on his site (with no
> advertising on it), the backend to his search form is *my* machine
> here at HealthGate. Whenever folk do a search on his site, my machine
> is the one that goes grunting through the 8.5 million documents that
> make up the Medline database... The problem is that we use
> advertising revenue to pay for the tremendous costs....
Donovan White <dwhite_at_olinfo.com> wrote:
>The solution would be to set your server up so that only your page produces
>search results, outside pages that use your search form code come back
>with, at a minimum, your original page. Which means you have to use
>cookies.
I agree with Donovan's proposed solution, but I don't think cookies
are necessary. Rather, Bob could make a modification to the CGI program
he uses to do the database searching in his server to check the URL of the
form the user posted to it (HTTP_REFERER) and do something different
depending on the URL of the form from which the search request was posted.
I've used this technique in a couple of different circumstances (emailers,
preference-choosers) to make sure I can control the form used to activate
a feature.
You can almost anything you want when you detect a hit from
some "alien" referring page:
--log it to keep a count of alien access, and otherwise handle normally
--rudely (or politely) reject the request
--do a redirect operation, to show your search page with ads
--etc.etc.
Bob also wrote:
> Currently, my ads appear on the "search results" pages that appear
> after Green's "search form." This, at least, gives me some revenue
> from his activity.
It sure does. So, Bob might not choose to actually reject
requests from alien forms. (In fact, he might look at those forms
and learn from them if they improve on his design, etc.)
> Would it be legal, ethical, etc. if he
> were to front-end in such a way that he "scraped off" my ads and
> inserted his own?
I should think that it would be perfectly ethical of Bob
to reject requests from the alien front end (again, by scrutinizing
the referring page) if the alien started censoring his ads.
Regards,
Ollie Jones VP Product Planning
Vivo Software, Inc. oj_at_vivo.com
htttp://www.vivo.com -- You can put video on your web page!
