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"Snippets" are mini-articles - they allow me to very quickly add answers to your frequently asked questions, and add brief explanations for topics that you've searched for without success. So, everytime you send an email or perform a search, chances are a new snippet will be the result!

18 Sep: Be wary of those search engine toolbars...

Do you have the Alexa or Google toolbar installed in IE? If you do, beware. I did until recently but there is a side-effect you should be aware of if you are a web developer.

If you upload pages to your server to test them and think it's safe because they aren't linked to from anywhere - think again.

The toolbars are listening, and will happily cache your "private" file and crawl it whenever it fancies...

I had a couple of admin pages that only I knew about, and one day I noticed they were being requested by the crawlers!

Update: Olivier Travers sent me in some follow up information about this subject. He asked Google if it was true and got the following response. To be honest, I can't remember if I noticed this with Googles toolbar. I definately had the issue with Alexa's.

"Thank you for writing to Google.

We're not at this time feeding that data into our crawlers.

Regards,
The Google Team"

Of course, I should point out the at this time part... be wary.

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