The Joel on Software Discussion Group

So you would like to measure the presence of your competitors OVER THE VISITORS OF YOUR SITE. Here is a practical and simple metric to measure exactly that:

http://www.cbsolution.net/roller/ontarget/entry/measuring_online_competitors

That's a pretty good idea and it'll work for what it does. But it'll work in javascript that is visible to the customer and you'll eventually get busted doing this. It's not illegal, but you'll look bad and your competitor can leverage that by letting everyone know you are 'hacking their computer' and 'violating their privacy'.

At least that's what I'd have to do if I found out my competitor was doing this! :-)

Hmmm, that is a _very_ clever idea though...

I should imagine the chance of getting caught as described by others is pretty small

I wouldn't be so sure about that, interesting things in site source code tends to get spread around, there are people who look at the source for various reasons.

But it occurred to me that if you wanted to do this and you have enough traffic, you can just turn the feature on for a couple days every few months. That should be sufficient to do the measuring, you just need an occasional sampling really.