I am in the process of releasing a mobile version of one of my web sites. So to get an idea of what browsers are hitting my site, Using Drupal CMS I installed the Browse Cap module. I noticed that Webaroo is hitting my site almost as much as the Google Bot. Running a web site I don’t mind Google hitting a site so much, because you get the traffic back from their search engine. The problem I see with Webaroo is that its basically 1 user grabbing all the traffic. Running the site on a shared host, I have to take into account where all my resources go.
Checking the Webaroo site I couldn’t find my site appear in any of the search results, so the question is “Should I block Webaroo or not”
Some searching on Webaroo mentioned them inserting their own Ads, which I am not a big fan off if they are simply caching the site, but this is what really concerned me, over at betanews :
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Webaroo/1154707595/1
One last thing: I rated this a 1 because Webaroo secretly runs a BitTorrent client on your computer. I've read all the license agreement and terms of service, privacy policy, FAQ, and everything else in the software and on the web site, and NOWHERE do they disclose that you will be contributing your upload bandwidth while downloading.
Now that’s a big concern to me just as a user. So it would be great to hear what other web site administrators are dealing with Webaroo.
1 comment:
Dear Mark,
I work for Webaroo. Our products aim to help consumers save the web content they like to their desktops or mobile devices, but we certainly do not wish to cache web sites that communicate their desire to not be cached. We respect the no-cache, no-archive directives and robots.txt. We also do NOT insert ads into the cached content.
If you tell me the web sites you refer to, our team can see why our crawler is hitting them so often. If you do want us to not crawl your web site, please set the robots.txt and our crawler will respect it.
with regards,
Vishy
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