At 01:20 PM 1/26/01 -1000, Reese wrote:
Formatting fixed
At 01:44 PM 1/26/01 -0500, Blank Frank wrote:
If you type "dumb motherfucker" (unquoted) in Google, the first hit is http://www.georgewbushstore.com/
which is not a parody site and includes this:
(Note: If you have arrived at this site through inappropriate references via a search engine, please be assured that we did not utilize this language in our site, our HTML, nor in our internet promotion of this site. What happened was the result of a malicious act and we are pursuing remedies through the efforts of our staff and attorneys.)
Anyone have any idea how that was done?
I'll leave discussion of whether the term is actually inappropriate for GWB to those who are better informed ;-) Google's search engines do weight their responses based on how many web pages link to a given page - there's probably some minor trick involved in getting the keywords into a page that doesn't use it (or at least perceived by Google to be.) But it's not that hard to develop an HTTP server that will serve up large numbers of "different" web pages that all reference the page you're trying to push - the server can go pretty fast when it doesn't need to read an actual file or search directories, just output a bunch of cached strings in some slightly random order that keeps google happy. Depending on google's search algorithms, there may be optimal mixtures of different domain names, IP addresses, and file names to encourage google's spiders to come back as fast as possible, and it's highly probable that somebody's been experimenting with that precisely to promote their commercial site. It helps to have high bandwidth, and it may help to piggyback on an existing web server just to include pointers to the fake-site-pool to increase the number of real links coming in from the outside world. Is google already trying to track hacks like this? Probably :-) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639