kevin lyda wrote:
>On Sun, Aug 07, 2005 at 10:23:13AM +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
>>>>http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-jun04.html>>>>>>here are the problems with that statistic:
>> it's from june of 2004. that's over a year old - and several
> amazing desktop linux distros have matured since then.
>>>yeah - but that's the last zeitgeist that actually mentioned the os or
browser. iirc, colm mentioned that google now have a policy of not
making that information public.
> web browsers lie. many people tweak their browser to lie about
> what they are running on.
>>>not that many... I know that Opera registers itself as IE by default
(although I think that policy has changed), but for other browsers, they
need to manually change that, and who could be bothered, except techies?
most people are /not/ techies.
> web proxies lie. i've configured squid in the past to rewrite
> browser ident strings.
>>>That's possibly dangerous. Some sites send out code depending on what
browser they believe is receiving it. This is usually an attempt to
provide better compatibility (although the recent Opera incident with
MSN showed another side to that...). If a site was led to believe the
receiver was IE, and sent code including ActiveX, IE-specific
JavaScript, etc - who is to blame for the fucked up view on the client's
machine? The server, which would have sent properly compliant code if it
believed the browser was /not/ IE? Or the proxy server which
deliberately tampered with the HTTP request?
> browser technology. i dunno what windows browsers are like, but
> most linux browsers i've used have a google box so most of my
> queries only hit google once.
>>>I assume Google knows the difference between a visitor and a hit.
> demographics part 2 - i don't know a single linux user who sets
> google as their home page. i know a few windows users who do. not
> to mention a slew of windows using cyber-cafes.
>>>absolutely true. I agree that this would skew the data somewhat.
Kae
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