I am getting mails and questions about BetterSearch utilizing the thumbnails from Alexa.com somewhat frequently. It seems to be Internet folklore by now that as soon as someone even thinks about Alexa.com, his or her computer will be overrun by evil spyware and malicious user tracking mechanisms. So, naturally my extension is accused to spy on people, to bring the worst of the Internet Explorer into the Firefox camp. That is not the case. All the extension is using from Alexa.com are their excellent thumbnails. There is no hidden traffic to or from Alexa.com. Also, since v1.5 there's an anonymization feature for all Alexa.com requests! (I still think it's not necessary, but many of you asked for this, so there.)
Once again: There is no user habit tracking in my extension. Unlike the Alexa toolbar for IE my extension doesn't notify the Alexa server of your browsing habits. It doesn't track where you are going, what you are doing, what you are clicking or not. All it does is finding the URLs of your search results, dismantle said URL to get the domain name. Then it'll insert a thumbnail image in the HTML page, and the URL of the thumbnail image contains aforementioned domain name, so the Alexa.com server knows what thumbnail to deliver. While the extension does that, there is no hidden data sent to the Alexa server. Neither your search request, nor who you are, nor what you are clicking through to.
Example: imagine you have a gallery webpage with images from all over the web. The page itself resides on server A, but the images shown on that page are on other servers, B, C, D and E. Now when you view that page in your browser, your browser will request the gallery images from the servers B, C, D and E. The information that is transmitted to B, C, D and E is "I need image XYZ, it was linked from page PQR on server A". It is likely that servers B, C, D and E are having server logs, and the log entry in this case is "at (date & time), page PQR on server A wanted image XYZ from us, the user used Firefox". Whether you finally click on one of the pictures or not -- B/C/D/E will never know, and unless A has put tracking abilities in gallery its links, neither will server A.
That's it. And incidently, that's exactly what BetterSearch is doing. In our case, server A would be google.com or a9.com or whatever search engine you're using BetterSearch on, and B/C/D/E would be thumbshots.org or alexa.com, depending on what thumbnail type you're using.
All Alexa.com might learn from your browsing sessions with BetterSearch is
- your browser version
- the IP the image was requested from (naturally, yours)
- that the thumbnail they are serving was requested from Google, A9, Yahoo...
- the date/time the request was made at
If that's still too much for you, then it's likely that BetterSearch will interfere with your aluminium foil hat anyways.
I hope this clears things up for you.
