Understanding where surfers were before going to one's web site(file manager stuff)

my web page provides me with the following (pasted with omissions):

____________________________________________________
Referrer Report
(Search Engines - Keywords - Referring URLs*) used by visitors to access the page.

Top web addresses viewed before coming to your page

http://pages.yahoo.com/nhrp
http://www.google.com/search
Unknown
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search
http://pub59.ezboard.com
___________________________________________________


the "Unknown", this appears from time to time in the above list. i suspect the surfer was using an anonymiser. any other ideas?

 

That's what I think too. I get those "unknowns" in my webstats. I figured they are using a proxy or anonymizer.

 

They might be using an anonymizer/proxy service, or an alternative browser or something like that.
I don't think there is anything you can do about it.

 

I think Unknown can also appear when the visitor didn't follow any link, but typed in you address directly. In this case there is no referrer.

 

I 'almost' never give out a referrer (sometimes for a pain in the *** page I'll look like I came from the target host).
I really don't consider it anyone's business where I was last.
There are a dozens of different ways, depending on the browser used. Proxomitron is an easy way to turn it off, as is (I think) wingate. There are referrer regedits (for IE) as well, etc.

 

Sometimes it is used to check which chat room a person is trying to enter, or which page they experienced an error on. But sometimes it is used for more invasive reasons.

I didn't try those programs, is there a way you can make it ask you if it should allow a refferer or not?

 

Not in IE that I'm aware of.........that's why Proxomitron is such a great tool. You can change or spoof most of your request headers and the best feature of all is that you can filter any web site to anything you want. You can change the HTML, filter javascript, take out all the ads etc. It's an extremely powerful tool and I'd recommend it to any power user.

 

For example I can open up Proximitron-- click on headers and make a referer filter. I enter in Finklestink in the replacement text and that's what all sites will see. Or I can make it so that only a particular site sees Finklestink. Or you have the option to set the referer to the host that you're requesting. So they'll never see where you came from. It's only limited by your imagination.
What they'll see:
HTTP_REFERER is Finklestink

 

I wish IE just used Headers.TXT so you wouldn't need another program to do this. I will try Proximotron out though, it sounds fun.