Animated Gif Captcha :: Google Suggest Scraper :: Tabbed Browser

QueryThe.Net Webmaster's Toolbox

Being a Web programmer and directory / web site owner, I always have the need for bigger and better tools (read: scripts) to help my sites succeed. If I cannot find a open source solution through sourceforge, I usually hack one into place myself. Rather than being greedy with my toys, I figured I would share them with my fellow webmasters. Below are some of my most useful ones, hopefully you will find one useful someday.

Animated Gif Captcha

I'm very excited to release my Animated Gif Captcha script which was much more difficult to dream up than it was to code. This captcha system succeeds where all the others fail. Can you answer this question ...

Most 10 year olds can too, but very few robots have this ability. Traditional captcha systems fail us with a variety of weaknesses.

Hard to read font style & size
Text that is contorted or overlapping beyond recognition
Flat text (not picture) based, easily broken by a cracker
Dependencies on libraries like GD
Flash or javascript based so they don't work in all browsers

So, What makes an animated .gif captcha any different? Many things that would cause one to consider it "user friendly" like ...

Easy to read text - bold font that is not contorted
Plain white background, never confuse letters and numbers again
Logical questions so that any children should be able to get the questions right, but bots won't
Math based so it's understood by people of all languages
125 different questions by default, you can raise that limit to meet your needs.
Every browser will display a .gif image ... The same cannot be said for things like flash, video & javascript captcha.

So, What makes an animated .gif captcha more secure? Simply put ... frames. Most captcha images are flat and can be translated and busted by a smart program with OCR capabilities. An animated gif captcha is much more difficult to decode because it is multi-framed. Animated gifs get their animation because they rotate multiple pictures at certian time intervals to give the animated look and feel. This helps with security because ...

programs (robots) will open the gif and only see the opening frame
125+ questions make breaking in by brute force unlikely
The frame count (total number of frames) is random also.
The frame time elapsed is random for another level of security

All this is done to keep spam out of your comment box, forum & directories. It works for me at a high success rate, you should try out animated gif captcha and see if it meets your needs.

Suggest Scraper

Just as the name implies, this script scrapes informaiton from the google suggest tool(bar). So what use is this to the common man? Absolutely none!

However, if you build websites for a living, it's a nice little tool that allows you to insert simple search terms and find out what words commonly comes next. For instance, submitting "nfl" to the tool you are returned: nfl rumors, nfl draft, nfl shop, nfl network, nfl teams, nfl hall of fame, nfl schedule, nfl rush, nfl news, nfl records

Get the drift? Do what you want with the keywords this tool provides. Application is supplied as an api and the full source code is included so you can do what ever you want with your site.

Ebay Scraper

Coming soon .....