Web Experiment Part 2

To see if, and how permanently, a nonsense term can be placed on the web


On the 6th of September, in Part 1 of this experiment I arranged for visitors to my website to automatically search yahoo for the term "yblagulous baby names". I wanted to see if this nonsense term would appear in yahoo's summaries of their search engine queries.

Sure enough, by mid-October, they had updated their listings to reflect September's searches. The most popular searches involving 'baby names' in September included :
1016116baby name
103122baby name meaning
57201baby girl name
51265baby boy name
45154popular baby name
31600top 100 baby name
etcetc
etcetc
10100baby name yblagulous
etcetc
etcetc

People use these listings for at two purposes that I know of.

Either of these might be done Of all the four combinations, I have no objection to people designing advertising campaigns, either manually or automatically. And if you're building a web page? If your web page has some real content, there's no harm tweaking the wording a little based on what people are searching for. I've done the same myself with great success.

The only activity mentioned here that I object to (and search engines also, generally) is

An example of someone who does the latter is the owner of "best4sites.com". If you click on their ads (normally displaying text like "we've found the best 4 sites for baby names") you don't see human-reviewed links to valuable web pages, instead, you see another bunch of 4 advertisements. Google doesn't like this, and nor do I.

So, part 2 of this experiment was to unveil the automatic website builders. No human would write a page about baby name yblagulous. After all, they'd have no idea what 'yblagulous' means. However, software would not bother about trivial things like meaning. Therefore, any page containing "yblagulous" would be a rubbish page with no real content. Err, I mean, any page except these ones!

Sure enough, within only a few days, on October 18th, a search on yahoo for "yblagulous" found a page! Within less than a week, someone had extracted yahoo's query data, created a bunch of websites automatically, and got them indexed by at least one search engine. The URL was "name.goodhip.com"

I visited the page, and sure enough, it was full of computer-generated gibberish.

And the target nonsense word "yblagulous"? There it was, near the bottom of the page

(highlighting added by me)

How long would this page stay on the web? How many other such pages would appear? More importantly, which search engines would index them and for how long? To answer these questions, I started part 3 of the experiment.