Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this month’s readers’ queries.
I run a website on crime prevention that includes advice for victims of domestic violence. Is it possible to make a website invisible to internet browsers so that it doesn’t show up on history files, etc and, therefore, arouse the suspicions of the perpetrators?
Interesting question. There are a number of ways in which you can do this. If you’re using Internet Explorer, go to View/Explorer Bar/History and this pulls up a list of sites. Right click on the one you want to get rid of, and choose delete. It’s then gone from the History.
It would also be necessary to clear the site from the Explorer cache as well, since it’s possible to browse through sites to see what someone has been looking for. To do that, go to Tools/Internet Options/History and clear History, though that gets rid of everything. The only other way to do it would be to install a utility that would allow you to quickly identify the page you want to delete, and delete it manually, but then there’s evidence on the machine (i.e. the utility itself), so that’s still a problem.
Another solution is to put some scripting on your pages that replaces your page with another in the History function. This is obviously done by you, rather than the person viewing the page, and it’s pretty straightforward. I found some websites that explain in detail exactly what code you need to put on your page and you can look at it in detail at: http://developer.irt.org/script/244.htm [dead link 20 April 2005]
and http://javascript.about.com/library/weekly/
aa122703a.htm (about half way down).
Finally, it’s of course possible to purchase software that hides traces of what you’ve been doing on the net, such as Privacy Eraser (www.privacyeraser.com/features.htm) but of course having this on the machine is again possibly going to cause difficult questions.
I’m looking for some sort of chart or diagram that displays the relationships between different search engines, such as which engines provide listings to which other search engines (for a class I’m teaching). Can you suggest anything that might be useful?
There are a couple of really nice charts like this. The Search Engine chart (www.ihelpyou.com/
search-engine-chart.html) shows links between 20+ search engines as an animation, while the Search Engine Relationship chart (www.bruceclay.com/
searchenginerelationshipchart.htm) (which is also animated) allows you to focus on a particular search engine, or view an overview of 16 major search engines.
I need to know which day of the week 13 April 1861 was. Do you know where I can find this out?
13 April 1861 was a Saturday. There is a collection of calendars at www.aaronscollection.com/
calendars/temp/index.htm [broken link removed 14 April 2005] from 1582 to 3000 which just lists days of the week.
Site of the month
My site of the month is URLinfo (www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/) which allows you to find out a huge amount of information about any web address, such as its traffic, backlinks, semantic information, similar pages, mentions in weblogs – in total about 70 different pieces of information. It’s entirely free to use, and great if you want to check a page for authority or if you need information on any of your own pages.
Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. Visit www.philb.com for free information on internet introductions, search engine articles, web design tips and a host of other free information. New: 3rd edn of The Advanced Internet Searcher’s Handbook is now available! If you have any questions about the internet send an email to philb@philb.com with the subject header ‘column query’.
Updated: 20 April 2005