What are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are saved on your computer by your browser. They help sites keep track of you. Without cookies, a site would be unable to remember your preferences or keep track of selections that you have made on different pages. Cookies usually contain a name, a value, expiration date, and the site that it came from.

The most common type of cookie is called a visitor cookie. Basically what this cookie does is keep track of how many times you return to a site. Each time you visit a site, it opens the cookie saved on your computer and increases its value one higher. This is benficial to the webmaster and end user. It lets the webmaster know which pages are recieving multiple visits from the same users. It is receiving to end users, because it provides better quality pages.

Another type of cookie is a preference cookie. It stores user's chosen value on how to load the page up. On a search eninge you might like to view up to 100 results of a search, where someone else just wants to get the best 20. It can also save color preferences, frames or no frames, etc.

One popular cookie is the shopping basket cookie. It is used on every online shopping site. What is does, is it assigns an ID value to you through a cookie. The ID number matches an ID file on their server and as you select items, it includes that item to the ID file on their server

The most infamous cookie is the tracking cookie. It is mostly used by ad banner companies. It works much like a shopping basket cookie, but instead of adding items to your ID file, it adds sites that you have visited. This is suppose to better serve you by displaying banners on your proven interests. The problem is that some companies, once they have gotten a hold of our email address (which they can only get if you supply it), will spam you on products with the information that they have gathered about you.