Cookiepedia Relaunched

We have released a brand new version of the Cookiepedia website this week, and we are very happy with the results, although there is more development to come.

We have been working on this update for the best part of six months, and have gone right back to the drawing board to build something entirely new and bespoke.  It was a huge job and involved a major re-engineering of the database. 

The result is that the site is much faster – particularly in returning searches – but we have also restructured the whole search, so that the results are a lot more meaningful.

You can now search for a cookie name or a website, and get what we think is some very insightful data – especially for people struggling with complying with the EU cookie laws.

In particular we are now able to automatically classify a lot more cookies into the key categories – Strictly Necessary, Performance, Functionality and Targeting/Advertising.   There is still a long way to go in this process – only 31% of the nearly 11 million cookies have been classified – but most importantly we now have a system in place that allows us to make big gains on this figure moving forward.

There is however still a lot more work to do – and we will be releasing more changes over the coming months.  We want to develop more summary data, presented in a meaningful way.  We are also working on a new ‘host domain’ search – which we think will give real insight into the third party tracking market – but it’s quite a difficult beast to get right.

We also remain committed to opening up Cookiepedia to external contributors – which is going to be the best way to create a truly comprehensive knowledge resource.  However, before we do that we want to make sure the structure is right – so that those contributions are properly attributed and surfaced in the right searches – and this also is not an easy task.

Something else we are going to look at is a cleaning up exercise, which might even result in a shrinkage of the database.  For example some sites and technologies create cookies with common functionality, but unique elements to their names.  So there might be a cookie called ABC_123, which is essentially the same as ABC_456 – yet at the moment we are treating these as distinct.  So we want to make some rules that will enable us to treat these as the same cookie, each time we see them.

So there is a lot of work to do – and we look forward to hearing your ideas as well – but we have now got a good base to work from.

Please take a look – www.cookiepedia.co.uk