How Do Websites Use Cookies?
Are you interested in technology and have you wondered about how websites use cookies? A cookie, also known as a tracking cookie, browser cookie, or HTTP cookie, is a text file that is stored on your computer by a website. The cookie can be used to track such information as shopping cart contents on websites, preferences, or authentication.
A website uses cookie software and code for a variety of different reasons. Depending upon what the website is attempting to use the cookie for will influence how the website uses the cookie. For example cookies can be used to:
- Track an individual’s time on a website.
- Store data about a user during his or her navigation of a website, even over a number of visits. When a cookie is used like this, it can be used as a shopping cart application on the website.
Today, a shopping cart application shows the items in the basket on a database on the server. However, before this was used, the information was stored on the cookie. The website sends a cookie a unique session identifier for the individual using the website. The website repeats the same session identifier each time the individual requests that a new item be placed in his or her basket. This items are then placed in the shopping basket associated with the session identifier.
Personalization and Tracking
Cookies can also be used by websites to personalize the website for each user. A website may use a cookie that contains the username of the last individual who logged in, so that it is more convenient for the user to log back into the website on his or her home computer. Further, when users select certain personalization on a website, this information is stored on cookies. The technology behind how this works is very similar to how shopping baskets on websites use cookies.
Websites may also use cookies to track users and users’ browsing. This is frequently done to track what type of websites that the user likes to visit. How can the website do this? If a website contains tracking cookies, and you request a page on the website and the website has no record of you visiting the site before, then it presumes this is your first visit.
The website server then creates a unique identification for you, and sends it to the cookie. The cookie is then automatically sent back to the browser every time you log back onto that website. In the time in between, the cookie has stored every website you’ve visited since you first were on the website to your return to the website. Depending on the website, there may be a variety of reasons for using cookies to track you. For example, the website may want to track your shopping habits.
What Are Cookies?
Cookies got their name from the longer term of “magic cookie.” A magic cookie is a packet of data that a program can receive and then send out again back to where it came from, unchanged.
In 1994, an individual by the name of Lou Montulli had the idea of using cookies on the Internet. Lou Montulli worked for Netscape, an Internet browser. When he was working there, Netscape was trying to solve the problem of a virtual shopping cart.
Montuilli’s ideas to use magic cookies solved this problem. Montulli then wrote the Netscape cookie specification code. This code was then used in the next version of Netscape that was released that year—Version 0.9 beta of Mosaic Netscape. Netscape used the cookies to track the individuals who visited the Netscape site. The patents for cookies were grated in 1998, and support for cookies was then developed by Internet Explorer.