The existence of the distinct physical files is entirely transparent to the user and of interest primarily to the technician managing the home page. One type of automated program is a search engine such as that created by Yahoo. These programs create hits on the remote server log every time they visit a site. This software was developed for use with Netscape 2.0 in an attempt to help users maintain their bookmarks. With Netscape software, users create bookmarks for web sites they would like to revisit, thus saving the time of rediscovering the site location.
Users can specify the time intervals for bookmark monitoring.
In addition, SmartMarks will monitor all links on the bookmarked pages. This means that a user who specifies daily monitoring of 25 bookmarks will create one hit a day on each of the 25 remote servers, and the servers to which the page has links, without viewing the distant web pages. While these automated programs may have marketing potential for publicizing and keeping users returning to sites, they certainly do not reflect what would normally be understood as consumer traffic. Their use inflates the number of hits on a server log. A proxy server is a client computer which acts as a server for other clients within its domain.