Every computer attached to the Internet has a number. For instance, this site has the number “[64.13.232.128]”. Via a translation table (DNS) this is shown in your browser as “leau.net”, a name one can hire for some time to attach to a certain number.

But some numbers are special. Number which are in the range 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.255 for instance are reserved for internal network use. This means that your local laptop, router and other computers at home have often numbers in this range (there are other options).

So web sites with this number should never be present in any search engine or other meta site archiving tools.

However, when I reinstalled the SeoQuake toolbar (after installing Firefox 3 on my U3 drive) I noticed that remarkable these internal sites DO have entries in Google, in Yahoo, in MSN, which, I think, is a bug. Think about it: spidering links to internal pages and showing them in a public search engine is useless. Google has done his job well and doesnt show information on the sites however MSN does AND this does make it interesting to see what people have running at home. It is ALSO a security risk since IF there really is a link, clicking it could pass parameters to the sites you run at home at internal LAN addresses (a lot of people seem to run private mailservers…).

The most remarkable was the site of the Internet Archive where you can see the following archived page from 2000 under the IP address 192.168.1.80 (above). You can see the page of their WIFI router! the SID is “tsunami” … They actually archived their own LAN pages haha… ultimate version control!

Now go ahead and try the other LAN addresses