Big pimpin'

Hey David -- Um.. not to pee on your parade, but the Alexa Toolbar, much like all other Alexa products, installs spyware on your system. If you are a paranoid schizophrenic like myself and don't like the idea of people tracking your movements all over the web, well, uh... ...well... don't install it.

But hey, anything from DavidKearns.com is kickass, spyware or not. :-)

For more information about how exactly the toolbar is spyware, check out http://simplythebest.net/info/spyware/alexa_spyware.html

For some reason it has never registered in my mind that Alexa is spyware. I'm guessing it's due to their early entry into the spyware business and the fact that they were (and possibly still are) very upfront about their spying activities.

However, as our Mexican-Hebrew (but not really Mexican) friend points out, they do spy on you, and they do report it back to "Alexa" (who seems to be in cahoots with, if not outright owned by, Google). If this bothers you, please don't install this bar.

But, I ask myself, does the Google bar "spy", or the Yahoo bar? Personally I use [url=http://flashpeak.com]SlimBrowser[/url] for popup blocking, and I do have the Google bar installed, but I've never thought about what spying activity either could be getting away with.

Alexa is not Gator, its not "spyware" within the meaning of the act. Alexa is quite upfront about what it collects and why. The Google toolbar can also collect data (or not) which is aggregated for its PageRank technology.

Both are legitimate collectors of data. Anyone paranoid enough to distrust Google shouldn't have an internet connection.

Touch

I forgot about that option with the googlebar. And it's not too much to expect to give something for the "free" license of their bar.

Touch?

No unicode support for comments?

That's something that needs fixing...