GeekPress: Still Scamming Google

archive
index

gp originals
google i
google ii
celebrating porn
idiot voters

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.

Still Scamming Google
by Diana Hsieh / 31 October 2000

The Case of Liv Tyler

My article on Scamming Google has some unexpected results. The most interesting is that the folks over at Google deny that the scam has any significant impact on the accuracy and usefulness of Google search results.

Slashdot, for example, quotes Google's CTO Craig Silverstein as saying that the Liv Tyler nude search doesn't, "as far as we can tell, have any good results -- in our spot check, for instance, we couldn't actually find any Web sites that show Liv Tyler in the nude. When there are no good results out there, Google's results can be somewhat arbitrary, so it's not particularly surprising this site was first."

As much as I love Google, I must disagree. I scoured through the first 30 results of the Liv Tyler Google to prove my point. Here are the results:

Index Pages: Most of the returned links were to the index page of a porn site, such as link #3 and link #6, both of which take you to the same JavaScript popup hell site. (I didn't bother checking the rest of these pages, because they obviously didn't have Liv Tyler nude on them.) These links are obviously not good Google results.

Scam Pages: Then there were the scam links, with fake discussions of Liv Tyler nude, such as link #1, link #2, link #4, and link #7. These links are also not good Google results.

Nude Liv: Google did, however, return some pages with Liv Tyler nude on them. The best page is probably link #5, which popped up after three scam pages and one index page. It has thumbnails of various movie shots of Liv Tyler in the buff. Link #25 and link #30 also has nude pictures of Liv. (I also noted two links somewhere between scam and the real thing, such as link #11 and link #21. These pages have non-nude pictures of Liv Tyler and a ton of links leading to various celebrity nude sites.

I also randomly checked a few of the low-ranked pages, with some unexpected results. For example, link #76 has a genuine discussion (!) of Liv Tyler's nude scene in Stealing Beauty. Link #116 has a nude picture along with a filmography. Link #192 and link #63 have fake nudes. Link #62 is a list of various Liv Tyler pages, some with a bundle of sexy images.

So, contrary to what the Google people say, there are good results for Liv Tyler nude. Google just isn't putting them at the top of the list.

Random Results?

But Google's problems do not end with the jumble of bad results for the Liv Tyler search. Google repeatedly puts the fake discussion pages of Nude Celebrity World News at the top of the search results in a huge number of searches for nude celebrities. But don't take my word for it. Google for yourself using the list of celebrities created by Nude Celebrity World News (modified to automatically search Google). You'll see the domains of www.jennifer-smith.com, www.news-in-review.com, www.find-thys.com, www.celebrity-locator.com, and www.celebrity-fans.com at the top of the list more often than "randomly."

Personally, I checked 50 of these searches, making sure to hit popular female celebrities like Meg Ryan and Heather Locklear. Here are my results:

3 searches yielded all top five search results (e.g. Kathy Bates).

9 searches yielded all top four search results (e.g. Bo Derrek).

16 searches yielded all top three search results (e.g. Linda Hamilton).

3 searches yielded both top two results (e.g. Lara Flynn Boyle).

1 search yielded the top result.

In all of the above searches, I just counted the set of top results, ignoring the matching results lower in the top ten.

Most importantly, however, is the fact that 16 searches for popular celebrities had at least one result in the top 10 (e.g. Toni Braxton, Janet Jackson, Nicole Kidman, Meg Ryan, Heather Locklear, Alicia Silverstone, and Sandra Bullock).

Only 2 searches did not yield any results in the top ten: Demi Moore and Jennifer Lopez.

These results are not random, as Google claims. Clearly, the sham discussion pages created by Nude Celebrity World News have worked their magic on Google. The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is in the search results.

So I stand behind my the point in my original article: Google has been fooled into repeatedly returning, as highly-placed results, pages which any human can identify as search engine spam.

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.