Dig Your Site For Exploits

by WebKeyDesign | Jun 7, 2005 | Internet Tools

These days, security is an important topic for everyone, but especially for the Internet world. We do not think about it as much, but for many of us, online has become second nature, almost like driving a car or breathing. For those of us who design or maintain web sites, addressing security should be something that we make part of our routine, and not an afterthought.

.Net Magazine featured story, Protect Your Site is a must read for webmasters.

You can run a simple scan of your site too, by downloading Foundstone’s SiteDigger 2. SiteDigger requires a Google API key, so you will need to register with Google for an account which is free. Once you do that all you need to do is insert the key into SiteDigger and input your site url. Google limits you to 1000 queries, so you will probably only be able to scan one site per day.

Of note is that you will probably only want to scan your site, if you scan someone else’s site, the excessive scanning might make a webmaster mistake you for a hacker and ban your IP address from their site.

SiteDigger will run only on Windows with .NET Framework, so if you are running MacOS, you will have to see if this works in VirtualPC or use an actual Windows machine.

Intent-based Searching

by WebKeyDesign | Jun 1, 2005 | Internet Tools

The big searching companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are working hard on developing new searching technologies that finally may solve some of the problems we all have with current internet searches. Yahoo’s Mindset is perhaps a good peak on the future of search and just how useful it may become when search results are no longer laden with an overabundance of advertisements and special offers.

Mindset works just like a regular Yahoo or Google search, but on the results page, you can move a slider to either Shopping or to Research, this way your results become filtered depending on where you move the slider bar to.

I tried a generic search for “Toshiba tv review” and when moving the slider to Research, the first link was in fact an actual review of a Toshiba product, and not an add or store listing for one.

It will be interesting just how well Yahoo’s Intent-based searching develops and how Google will implement their own version of it in the future.