Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this month’s readers’ queries.
Can somebody make themselves invisible on the web? Say for example someone was a member of some dubious group in their spare time – e.g. British National Party, or naturist morris dancers – and didn’t want work colleagues to know, could they ‘wipe’ themselves off the usual search engines?
Interesting question. The answer is ‘probably not’. Though it depends on where they’ve been and what they’ve done. If they have posted to newsgroups, that’s going to be archived in Google groups. They’d need to find every post they’d written and ask Google to delete them. They wouldn’t, however, be able to delete any postings by other people who mentioned their postings. They’d also have to find every web page they’re mentioned on. If they own the web page(s) they could delete them, and then eventually search engines would remove them from their index.
However, if they were mentioned on web pages they didn’t own, they couldn’t delete those, so the information would still be available. They’d also need to go to the internet archive and do the same thing there. If they’ve posted to various bulletin boards they couldn’t do anything about that unless the owner was prepared to delete postings they were mentioned in. If they have a common name, they could simply deny all knowledge and say it’s someone else. If it’s an unusual name, it’s not going to be possible to do it.
So, if they’ve not said much on the net, maybe they could. However, if they’ve been prolific, then I’d say, no, it’s not possible to remove every trace. Hope that satisfies your curiosity!
Is there a way of finding out if there is a site with a similar enough domain name to ours to be able to divert traffic from us?
There is a utility that can help: www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/whois.htm
It’s a free download, and very easy to use. If you run a check you’ll find which other variants of the name are available, including the .com version, which you may want to register if you have not done so already.
When looking through the statistics on my website I’ll often see an IP address, rather than a name. Is there any way of getting more information on it?
Yes, a good tool for this can be found at
http://network-tools.com/ and it has a variety of other interesting utilities as well, allowing you to run traces, and so on. Just pop in the IP address you’re interested in, and you should be able to get some more information on it.
Site of the month
My site of the month is one that will be familiar to readers of the Lis-Link mailing list, so apologies if you’ve already seen it. It’s called Wordcount ( www.wordcount.org/main.php ). It’s basically a listing of the 80,000+ most common English words. The fun thing with it is to see where the word you’re interested in is, and what words are either side. For example, ‘update’ is the 5,987th most popular word, with ‘consisting’ and ‘qualification’ either side of it.
Updated: 20 January 2005