Grisoft makes a wonderful batch of security products. They do Grisoft AVG, which is anti-virus. But they also do anti-spyware, anti-spam, firewall, et cetera. And they even have a wonderful personal-use free anti-virus package, AVG Free.

Recently they released the upgrade to version 8. And many users joined in, making their PCs safer than ever. New to version 8 is a new tool, a link scanner called, aptly enough, LinkScanner. What it does is when you do a Google (or Yahoo or Microsoft) search, it pre-examines the links to the search results to make sure that they’re safe to click on. Which sounds good. For PC users, it is. LinkScanner does a good job of pretending to be a real user clicking on that link, to make sure that mean nasty websites that will try to hack you will try to hack the LinkScanner when it scans them. Since people can construct mean nasty websites to hack you, this is a good tool.

Unfortunately, like so many swords, the blade is double-edged. Yes it’s good for us home users. But it’s bad for people who run websites. Because it does such a good job of pretending to be a real user, it also means it’s really hard to tell these fake pre-scans from actual people visiting your website. Before if someone did a Google search you only got a “visit” if someone actually clicked on the link and visited your website. But now if someone does a Google search and they use Grisoft AVG 8, every search result from that search gets a “visit” even if the person who did the search doesn’t click on a single link.

Why is this so bad? Because it completely skews the traffic information of who is visiting what website. If you get the glorious position of being a top search result, now you’re getting tons and tons more “visits” to your website, even though no one more than before is actually visiting. It’s all just the pre-scanning done by Grisoft’s LinkScanner. And these extra hits are not just skewing traffic information, but also costing the website extra money because they’re the one paying for the hosting bandwidth to keep their site there for you to read.

As both a website owner and a web user, I have to say however, the concept is worth it. Anything that protects users, within reason and rights, is good technology in my opinion. Is it an inconvenience to us website owners? Well, yeah. But so are the millions of robots rooting around out there. That’s just part of the internet. In my opinion anyone who is really complaining about yet another piece of technology complicating things is just a whiny little bi_ch.

But that said, the approach could most definitely be cleaned up to be both web-user and site-owner friendly.

How?

By not pre-scanning every freaking link! Duh! Why is it so hard to pre-scan only the link clicked on and pass that page through the cache into the browser if and only if the page is safe? And if it isn’t safe, or is questionable, a little “This page looks bad. Are you sure you want to visit it?” kind of pop-up window gives users a choice. That way users are still protected, and that protection incurs absolutely no additional page hits. Antivirus software has pre-examined downloads forever in such a manner. Using a similar approach to loading websites themselves would make everyone happy.