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Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com.

Scamming Google
by Diana Hsieh / 30 October 2000

Note: Be sure to check out Still Scamming Google, my response to comments made by the folks at Slashdot and Google. I provide rebuttals (with lots of evidence from Google searches) to the claims that there are no good results to a search for Liv Tyler nude and that the scam doesn't yield good Google results on popular actresses.

Search Engine Woes and Wonders

Finding new and better ways to scam search engines has long been a popular pastime of webmasters. Traditionally, search engines used keywords found in metatags and the body of html pages to index a web site. So in order to get high placement on popular searches, webmasters listed every possible keyword even remotely related to their site. After a while, as we all know, most search engines became fairly useless because of all the junk sites listed in the search results.

We were saved from this searching nightmare by Google, that delightfully minimalist and shockingly accurate search engine. Google is able to consistently find what we seek because it does not rely upon honesty of webmasters to accurately report the contents of their own sites. Instead, Google uses the implicit evaluations and descriptions of a web site found in the links to that site created by other webmasters. To use a simple example, if I get cooking web sites to prominently link to my soup recipes site with text like "amazing soup recipes," "recipes for super soups," and "cream soup recipes," then when a Google searcher enters "soup recipes," my site is likely to be near the top of the list. (See Google's explanation of their technology.)

Google has proven to be a remarkably robust engine, despite the substantial growth in both its popularity and the number of web pages indexed. Google boasts in their technology page that "Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult." Difficult: Yes. Impossible: No. Webmasters can drive traffic to their site through Google by creating rings of pages feigning discussion of a given topic.

The Google Scam

I discovered this scam through Jimmy Wales of Bomis, who was checking out some Google results for "his own nefarious purposes." He noticed that the first result of a Google search for "Phoebe Cates nude" was a sham discussion of Phoebe Cates in which all of the links (interspersed in the text) lead to Nude Celebrity World News. As Wales noted, "the [sham discussion] page looks, to anyone other than a human, like a sincere discussion of the 'issue' of Such-and-Such Person Nude on the Internet.

(It comes as no surprise to me that this scam was designed by a porn site owner. They're always ahead of the curve.)

This Google scam is more extensive than it seems at first glance. For each of 2201 celebrities, there are at least four web pages (each with a separate domain name): two discussion pages, a FAQ, and a search results page. To us humans, each of these pages is obvious as an automatically-generated search engine "spam" designed to bring searchers to Nude Celebrity World News.

For example, one of the Liv Tyler discussion pages starts off:

There has been some discussion about Liv Tyler nude on the internet. We would like to put the issue to rest. If you want to see some pictures of Liv Tyler nude then your best chance is to click Liv Tyler and you will be taken to the best pictures of her on the internet!

The Liv Tyler FAQ includes astute questions and answers like:

Why doesn't Liv Tyler marry me?
Probably because you are a hopeless loser and she is a famous celebrity. But you can go HERE to see naked photos of her.

This technique is remarkably effective in getting high-ranking results in Google. In most of the searches I tried with the relevant celebrity name and "nude," at least three of these spam pages showed up in the top five search results.

In the Liv Tyler example, A Google search for "Liv Tyler nude" yields 6,700 results. Results #1, #2, and #4 are spam discussion pages in which all links lead to Nude Celebrity World News.

So with a simple list of celebrities, a PERL script (or Power Basic, in this case), and a couple domain names, anyone could create amazingly effective spam for Google searches on over 2000 nude celebrities. Not bad.

The Beneficiary

The most interesting aspect of this whole scam is that the benefiting site, Nude Celebrity World News, isn't your usual a scamming porn site. There aren't any popup windows. There aren't even any banner ads. At first glance, there isn't much content either. There is a section called "The Vault" which is for subscribers only, but it is easily missed.

Frankly, the lack the usual porn site scamming combined with the Google scam puzzles me about Nude Celebrity World News. All of the domains involved are owned by the company (Orbitonet), so I would have expected either a more consistent pro-scamming and anti-scamming policy. (The internic contact for the company, Jesus Enrile argues that the fake discussion pages are just "aggressive search engine marketting [sic]," not a scam, since Nude Celebrity World News does actually have nude images of these celebrities. Fair enough.)

What Now?

The consolation in all of this scamming is that porn surfers will not be diverted from their pictures of nude celebrities for long. Google will fix this problem, just as they have fixed other problems that have cropped up with their search indexing algorithms. I'm sure that the war between aggressive webmasters and Google will continue. Let's hope that Google stays flexible and keeps the scammers at bay.

Otherwise, all shall be lost. Literally. We won't be able to find anything on the web.

About the Author

Diana Hsieh is the owner and co-editor of GeekPress, an irreverent filter for the most unique and interesting technical news of the day. She also sporadically writes and lectures on philosophy, Objectivism in particular. She can be reached via e-mail to diana(at)geekpress.com.