Introduction to Cookies
By Sowparnika Gopal
What are cookies?
Cookies are a technology that can be used by webmasters to achieve great results. Using cookies has got a lot of advantages and they are very often not made full use of. Webmasters can use cookies to find information about returning users. It is a very simple technology that implants text files into the user’s machine. The cookie is implanted in the first visit and every time a person revisits the site, the cookie identifies it as a returning user. The cookies remain on the user’s computer even if Internet has been disabled and connected again. Very often the IP addresses of the computers and shared and each time a person logs in, the IP address would be different, which makes it very difficult to identify returning users. This is where the function of a cookie comes in. Scripting in PHP, JavaScript or ASP pages can implant cookies.
Uses of Cookies
- Many search engines and web portals use cookies to provide customized pages such as in Yahoo, “My Yahoo” and so on.
- Websites also use cookies to login the user automatically. The data is saved in a coded form in the text documents in a folder within the user’s computer. This will save time for the users when they login.
- Cookies are mostly used to get validated results while tracking visitors. While each user has a cookie, they will not be counted more than once while analyzing the website. Also, certain cookies can also show the path in which the user moved into the site and the exact details of the time frame a person spent at the site.
Using Cookie text file
A cookie is a basic data file. The file has:
- A name
- A value
- Address of the website which are allowed to
access it
The name is used by the website
to address it. No other site can access the cookie
even if they know the name or even if the same
name exists for some other cookie as well. The
name should be unique to that website, but can
clash with names of cookies of other websites.
A cookie can store upto a maximum of 4000 characters
of data. If you want to set user preferences for
a search engine, then you can list the preferences
for a search engine.
To retrieve data, a website has to request if
the user has a cookie with a particular name.
If the user has it, then the value is returned
to the script and from thereon it will be dealt
with in the way the website owner has set his
preferences.
Cookies have limited life. They will be assigned
an expiry date and time. It is upto the website
owner again to decide the life of a cookie. Most
often the life of the cookie is set at an hour,
assuming that the session length of the visitor
will not exceed an hour. So, in an hour, whatever
be the number of times the person with the same
cookie ID returns, it will be considered as just
one user.
Cookie Security
Cookies normally pose no harm or damage to the user or his machine. It invades privacy for those who do not want to be identified as visitors to a site. The working of a cookie is simple. The browser actually writes and reads cookies from the computer when requested by a website. For webmasters, there are some security concerns. When a cookie is set, the domains, which it can access is set. Usually only the website can set the cookies. This makes it relatively secure and you can be sure that no one can load the cookie from any of your visitor’s computers. There is no means even to find out that a cookie exists. One major problem that the cookies pose is that it can be easily read by anyone using the computer.
Apart from that, cookies are a great way to analyze and keep the record of the visitors to your site. This will also help in doing user behavior analysis of the visitor.
What next?
Fill in our contact us form to know how Nabler can help. It would be our pleasure to assist you in making your business succeed.
If you would like to know more about our Web Analytics services, please see our Web Analytics Services page.
