Thursday, June 22, 2006
How Billions of Bogus Pages Undermine Search Engines, Advertisers and The Web:
"Over the weekend, Monetize, a blog dedicated to tricking search engines, described how a blackhat got Google to index over 5 billion webpages within three weeks. Yahoo and MSN were fooled, too, though nowhere near as badly. (MSN, for example, indexed just 62 pages before cutting him off.)
Searchers who landed on the pages were treated to copy scraped from legitimate websites, along with Pay-Per-Click ads from Google or Yahoo.
The effort seems to have met some success. Third-party traffic monitor Alexa noticed enough activity to rank at least one of the rogue sites among the 2,000 highest traffic sites on the web. That's a phenomenal ranking for any site, especially a three week old site based in Romania....
...Back in April, spyware hunter Ben Edelman charged that some adware automatically clicks on pay-per-click advertisements presented by Yahoo on the websites of Yahoo syndication partners. And Edelman named names.
He has since joined the legal teams are pursuing Yahoo for enabling Pay-Per-Click fraud...
...As searchers and advertisers grow more restive, the Search-and-PPC biz looks increasingly dicey... especially for those who depend on it for over 90% of their revenue, like Google, whose SEC filing reminds:
The Company's revenues are principally derived from online advertising, the market for which is highly competitive and rapidly changing. Significant changes in this industry or changes in customer buying behavior could adversely affect the Company's operating results...
...What the world needs now is someone with global reach, clean search results, and thoroughly authenticated ad servers.
Could be just what the doctor ordered... for Microsoft?"
"Over the weekend, Monetize, a blog dedicated to tricking search engines, described how a blackhat got Google to index over 5 billion webpages within three weeks. Yahoo and MSN were fooled, too, though nowhere near as badly. (MSN, for example, indexed just 62 pages before cutting him off.)
Searchers who landed on the pages were treated to copy scraped from legitimate websites, along with Pay-Per-Click ads from Google or Yahoo.
The effort seems to have met some success. Third-party traffic monitor Alexa noticed enough activity to rank at least one of the rogue sites among the 2,000 highest traffic sites on the web. That's a phenomenal ranking for any site, especially a three week old site based in Romania....
...Back in April, spyware hunter Ben Edelman charged that some adware automatically clicks on pay-per-click advertisements presented by Yahoo on the websites of Yahoo syndication partners. And Edelman named names.
He has since joined the legal teams are pursuing Yahoo for enabling Pay-Per-Click fraud...
...As searchers and advertisers grow more restive, the Search-and-PPC biz looks increasingly dicey... especially for those who depend on it for over 90% of their revenue, like Google, whose SEC filing reminds:
The Company's revenues are principally derived from online advertising, the market for which is highly competitive and rapidly changing. Significant changes in this industry or changes in customer buying behavior could adversely affect the Company's operating results...
...What the world needs now is someone with global reach, clean search results, and thoroughly authenticated ad servers.
Could be just what the doctor ordered... for Microsoft?"
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