What's happening here? I try to clip a few words from a page and get an address attached

[Brainiac]

I tried this from a couple of computers, so I think it must be part of the page.
It’s a news item, and when I tried to cut and paste a short phrase from the story into my search engine, the clipboard contained my selection plus a link to that page.

Here’s the page I’m looking at
I highlight the words “UCLA study showing a link between soda and obesity” and hit Ctrl-c

and my clipboard has all this on it:
“UCLA study showing a link between soda and obesity
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/17/BAF619OSF4.DTL#ixzz0RTrLXqEb”

That attached link even highlights the words I selected

I tried picking up words a little to the left and right of it and got just the normal text.

[ZipperJJ]

http://tracer.tynt.com

Pretty interesting, I think.

[Brainiac]

“We don’t collect any identifiable data about the visitor at all.”

WOW! Wait til Cheney’s minions still in the CIA learn about this. Don’t tell me that once it’s possible they won’t start monitoring it.

[Reply]

It appears the page is using a bit of JavaScript magic to append that text whenever you copy from it (but maybe only for long enough chunks of text). You can turn off JavaScript if you’d like.

Here’s a post about it on some other website.

[yabob]

Tynt says:

1. Most content copying is non-malicious. On sites running Tynt we find that anywhere from 2 to 15% of page views result in a copy action (some sites are as high as 50%!) From what we can infer, the vast majority of cut and pastes are done strictly to keep personal track of content that they find interesting, or to share it with a few of their friends. They are not copying it to re-use somewhere else. Certainly that happens too, but thankfully, it appears to be a very small percentage.

It does appear that they take action on highlight, not on actual cut and paste. I would submit that there’s a very large percentage that isn’t even THAT meaningful. To quote from that discussion:

Slightly off-topic, but I tend to highlight text as I read it, and I find it very annoying how they seem to automatically save the text snippet that you highlight whenever you highlight it. The progress bar constantly updates and it’s quite distracting.

In my case, it’s not even necessarily the text I’m reading. If my hand happens to be resting on the mouse I’m often aimlessly highlighting stuff with it for no good reason at all - I’m just frobbing with the mouse. Any data they’re collecting on that is pretty much garbage.

[J_Cubed]

I habitually highlight next near where I’m reading, so I can’t read the New York Times without disabling scripting or getting pop-ups with failed searches for giant terms.

[AHunter3]

@Copied & Pasted from my clipboard

UCLA study showing a link between soda and obesity

My browser, or my OS, would appear to be immune. I don’t have Javascript disabled.