Slovenski prevod tukaj.
This year hasn’t really been smooth sailing for my extension. I’ve had quite a few issues that — as is tradition — lots of people complained about in the reviews, while at the same time nobody really thought to … like, open an issue over on Github or even write me an e-mail or something? You don’t even need to stalk me to get it — it appears on the Chrome Web Store listing, and then also at least twice in the extension itself. If you don’t behave like an asshole, I’ll even be nice.
I swear — if people’s first instinct were to use a two-way medium of communication as opposed to going for the 1/5 button that only ever goes one-way; if provided some of the most basic information (such as: addon version (“latest” isn’t a valid answer) and the browser they’re using); and if people actually did the thing you ask of them instead of making things up … Let’s just say that some problems would be fixed a lot faster, and some might even have not happened.
Whoops, went on a bit of a tangent. Where was I?
Right, Ultrawidify. To recap — back in January there were issues. In a bid to debug said issues, the extension started injecting invisible elements into every webpage that contained a video that a user visited. Invisible elements included an invisible “secret message” — and soon enough, that secret message started to appear in Google search results:
But how could that be? This secret message only existed on the webpage if you visited said webpage with my addon enabled. This message only ever existed for real human users of my addon, therefore it should be impossible for search engines to pick it up. Yet there it was.
Needless to say, I was confused.
Until yesterday, when ArsTechnica released an article describing how shady browser extensions secretly incorporated code that turned browsers of real users into web scrappers. Long story short: we have a startup — Mellowtel — that came to extension developers with the following deal:
You, extension dev, receive: money
I, Mellowtel, receive: you put our web scrapper into your extension, so we can use your real users to scrape the web
Ironically, I was surprisingly on point when I said, in the previous blog post on this matter:
So how does that happen? Currently, there’s about two options that come to mind:
- […]
- Google is getting some of its crawling data from the websites users of Google Chrome visit
The part where my guess was wrong is where I thought Google is using Google Chrome users to crawl the web. Turns out that no — Google isn’t using Google Chrome users to crawl the web for them. Mellowtel is doing that, by paying addon makers to put their scrapper into their addons. As Mellowtel scraps websites by loading the websites they want to scrap inside of an invisible iframe inside of a real user’s browser, then user’s extensions may also run inside those invisible iframes. Which means that if any of the user’s addons modify the webpage in any way, then those modifications will appear in Mellowtel’s data.
And Google then buys that data from Mellowtel, so … potayto, potahto.