Re: ONLINE-ADS>> cache counting standards

Tom Hukins (tom_at_eborcom.com)
Fri, 19 Jun 1998 17:31:17 +0100

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Matthew Donald wrote:

>WebMeasure and AdMeasure track visitors (the audience) through
>fingerprints. The fingerprint is a hash of a number of attributes such
>as IP address at the browser, IP address when received by the
>mini-server, java vendor, operating system, browser type and so on.
>This is also used to track click-throughs. If a given user sees an ad
>and then immediately sees the click-target, obviously they have clicked
>on the ad.

Using IP addresses to attempt to track visitors is a very bad idea. Complex
proxy configurations mean that requests originating from the same browser
on the same computer are logged as coming from different IP addresses.

For example, take a look at your server logs for visits from AOL. Requests
within the same session can be observed coming from different IP addresses,
because they are being redirected through different proxies. The UK
academic Web cache and other large proxy caching projects use similar
techniques.

Furthermore, complex hierarchical caching projects (for an example see
<http://ircache.nlanr.net>) may cause final requests to come from a number
of different IP addresses.

There are a huge number of Web visits which come from multiple IP
addresses. I have cited three large-scale cases off the top of my head.
Nobody who is seriously trying to competently track user sessions on the
Web is using this technique.

There has been a great deal of excellent discussion on the subject of
session tracking on the mod_perl list <http://perl.apache.org/> recently.

Regards,
Tom

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