whizbang.com

This WhizBang! Labs is starting to get annoying. I’ve noticed in the past week the number of hits on my diary was far too high to be believed. This is, in large part, thanks to some search spider at whizbang.com out of WhizBang! Labs. I checked their link to find out why they’d be so interested in me that I’d have 295 hits from them yesterday alone.

From their “What is Information Extraction?” page I have discovered that(the bolding is my own contribution to this quote):

Information Extraction

[ ” I E ” ] is finding and extracting pre-determined information from Web pages and other text documents. For example, the constantly changing contact information from thousands of companies (such as, primary and secondary business phone numbers, e-mail addresses, names and titles of executives) could be obtained by using information extraction software that has been trained to find and extract these specific facts and then store them in a relational database. Or, the same software could be trained to find and extract specific employment and educational information (such as, employers and dates employed, universities, degrees, and dates attended) from millions of job applicants’ textual resumes.

They go on to say that:

WhizBang! Labs focuses only on information extraction

with industrial strength products and services that are used by some of the world’s largest information providers to change the nature and structure of their industries. Dun & Bradstreet within corporate information, Monster.com, and FlipDog.com in online recruiting, and the U.S. Department of Labor in continuing education, are all using WhizBang! Labs’ products and services to meet their massive information extraction needs.

Here’s the paranoid in me coming out. How much ya wanna bet that this is also used by some of the world’s smaller information users, like spam-meisters looking to get active e-mail addresses to send out yet more useless junk mail? I can’t imagine a Dun & Bradstreet or a Monster.com or the U.S. Department of Labor being interested in my diary for some reason.

Another thing I find interesting is that WhizBang! only shows up on my Dear Diary counter, not my SiteMeter. It either somehow cloaks itself from SiteMeter, or SiteMeter elects not to tell me about these visits.

I believe I’m going to send WhizBang! Labs a little e-mail (from one of my lesser used Hotmail accounts, [email protected]) and ask them what they heck they’re up to. I’d love to hear what they have to say.