have never been sure
2006-12-08 23:05:03 · 11 answers · asked by landgirl60 4 in Computers & Internet ➔ Other - Computers
Cookies
Cookies are actually harmless text files that certain web sites will place onto the hard drive of your computer. Your Internet Browser will then load the information into memory while you are visiting their site. The Cookie itself, actually takes up very little space and acts as an identification card for the visiting site. You can compare this to visiting your favorite restaurant where your food server will usually remember certain aspects of how you like your food prepared and what you usually order. This information would obviously be based upon his familiarity of your prior visits. Well Cookies actually act in a similar manner and do not contain viruses as a virus must be executable file. Let us look at some of the ways that Cookies act as an identification card.
Why Sites Use Cookies?
There are numerous reasons why websites would want to use cookies. These range from statistical purposes, such as how many visitors came to the site. This can be further broken down into are they new visitors or actually repeating visitors and how often do they visit. The Website would actually create a unique id for each visitor and store this information into a database.
Cookies can be used to store your personal preferences, referred to as customizations, that you set while navigating their site. For instance, if you visit Yahoo.com, you can sign in to create your very own personal yahoo page where you can customize it according to your news and weather preferences after providing your zip code. You can even change the color of the page layout as well.
Online Shopping sites can use cookies to keep track of items that you add to their shopping carts and quick checkout options. The cookie will keep track of every item that you add to the shopping cart while you continue to browse through different pages or even entirely different sections of their site. Every item you add is stored within the Web site’s database along with a unique ID value that has been assigned to you. Therefore, when you select the check out option, the site automatically knows what items are in your cart by retrieving those selections from its database. This is why sites such as Amazon or eBay will prompt you to enable cookies in case you have disabled them.
Cookies also provide web designers and programmers with a quick and convenient method of keeping their site content fresh and up to date according to the interests of their users. Modern web servers use Cookies for back-end interaction as well, allowing them to securely store any personal data that the user has entered within a site. Therefore, on return visits the user now only has to enter partial information to access their account and purchases can be made quicker as their payment information is on file regarding their previous purchases.
2006-12-08 23:08:00 · answer #1 · answered by G 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Cookies are used to trace the sites you visit. If you want to know which sites have cookies in your computer then do the following
Press Start Click on search. Click on All files and Folders. Type in cookies and when the result appears Click more locations [hard drive] and Press search You can Remove ALL of the COOKIES but unless you know what you are doing it is NOT Adviseable.
2006-12-09 02:47:24 · answer #2 · answered by D G 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
cookies are small programs put on your pc by websites that you visit. they have their uses in that when you return to a site, the site will recognize you by the cookie it left last time. these cookies are basically clutter on your hard drive. I delete mine along with the Internet temp files every few days. with Internet Explorer (IE) click on TOOLS on top, then Internet options. on the first tab in the middle of the page you'll see 2 buttons for deleting cookies and temp files. Click Ok on the bottom after it's done clearing them.
You could have 100's of megabytes of temp files there and it may take a few minutes. clearing the temps could improve your download speed of web pages.
2006-12-08 23:17:30 · answer #3 · answered by Lou... 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
A cookie is a piece of text that a Web server can store on a user's hard disk. Cookies allow a Web site to store information on a user's machine and later retrieve it. The pieces of information are stored as name-value pairs.
For example, a Web site might generate a unique ID number for each visitor and store the ID number on each user's machine using a cookie file.
If you use Microsoft's Internet Explorer to browse the Web, you can see all of the cookies that are stored on your machine. The most common place for them to reside is in a directory called c:\windows\cookies. When I look in that directory on my machine, I find 165 files. Each file is a text file that contains name-value pairs, and there is one file for each Web site that has placed cookies on my machine.
You can see in the directory that each of these files is a simple, normal text file. You can see which Web site placed the file on your machine by looking at the file name (the information is also stored inside the file). You can open each file by clicking on it.
2006-12-08 23:18:51 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Lavasoft Adaware SE is a free program that scans your putor and removes cookies and tracking cookies that could later be a problem. You can get rid of cookies by going to Tools, Internet Options and delete the cookies every once in awhile.
2016-05-22 22:35:36 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
A cookie is an online computer file containing user information: a computer file containing information about a user that is sent to the central computer with each request.
The server uses this information to customize data sent back to the user and to log the user's requests.
2006-12-08 23:18:19 · answer #6 · answered by Scabius Fretful 5 · 0⤊ 1⤋
They store info from a web page that has user information from those webpages in them. So if you type in info on a webpage, its stored in a cookie along with the webpage info for faster retrieval by the net and your PC! :)
Hope this helps
2006-12-08 23:08:37 · answer #7 · answered by Dr Tesfurdo 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
hmm...cookies are like hidden bookmarks for your browser...it saves the website for future reference...this makes your computer load a page you have visited faster...its because you have the files in a compressed part of your hdd...
2006-12-08 23:59:57 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
They are files set by the server in your machine to store session values and manage your session. It wont harm your computer
2006-12-08 23:35:17 · answer #9 · answered by Sujith 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
They are little temp Internet files that keep track of websites that you go to and if you go to the website again it will recognize the website and download it quicker for you.
2006-12-08 23:08:50 · answer #10 · answered by Louis K 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋