Product Blog

It’s almost the end of an era in advertising. Google has started phasing out third-party cookies, beginning with 1% of Chrome users in January 2024. It plans to do the same for all users by the second half of the year through the Privacy Sandbox initiative.

To recall, Google’s Privacy Sandbox is a set of proposals for creating new standards for online privacy. The core idea is to develop methods for websites and advertisers to access user information for things like advertising and content recommendations without compromising user privacy. Among its key goals? Phasing out third-party cookies.

Do you ever wonder why many organizations block employee access to not-safe-for-work (NSFW) websites?

Content filtering, the process of blocking access to NSFW websites, has long been believed to be just about improving employee productivity. And that’s not surprising since a survey indicated that 58% of employees spend at least four hours a week or 26 workdays a year on websites unrelated to their job.

We are excited to introduce Website Categorization API V3, the latest addition to our Website Categorization product line. This innovative release enables more accurate website classification with its enhanced website categorization model and additional output data points.

Specific improvements to this version of Website Categorization API include:

A fundamental requirement of website categorization is accurately classifying websites into relevant categories. But that can be challenging, as the task typically requires targeted web expertise and a multitude of system resources. Therefore, to improve their web categorizing capabilities, large companies and solution providers often need the help of a reliable third-party API.

In this post, we listed the essential considerations when evaluating potential website categorization API providers.

WhoisXML API offers, via API calls, a lot of information on domains or IP addresses that is very useful for a number of applications, including cybersecurity investigations, domain appraisal or system administration. Imagine that one is given a long list of domain names, and one is interested in each domain’s details, e.g., WHOIS or website categories, etc. In each API call, a single domain name is sent, and its data is returned in JSON format. (Some of the APIs of WhoisXML API offer bulk lookups, too, but we will not deal with this possibility here.) To get an overview of the data, analysts often prefer to have everything in a single csv file; one line for each domain. This can be opened by popular office spreadsheets like Excel or LibreOffice Calc, or sent to other kinds of processing. 

Great attention has been directed lately towards website categorization; a cybersecurity practice which has been around for a while, but it wasn’t until recent times that it started to be increasingly used in marketing and business.

Website categorization is, in essence, the act of putting websites related by their content and function into similar categories. With that in mind, sites like Amazon and Ebay are grouped as Ecommerce sites; CNN, BBC and the likes are classified as news sites; Twitter and Facebook are tagged as social media sites, while Reddit and Quora are Forums (Message Boards) and so on.

However, what some people might not realize is that website categorization is a totally different ball game from Search Engine Optimization and Alexa rankings. Each is different and should be approached in that light – and not be confused.