Flutterby™! : Search engine manipulation 2002-03-19 16:24:42+00

Search engine manipulation

2002-03-19 16:24:42+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

Just because I always say "Dori says" when linking to Backup Brain, here's some linkage for Tom Negrino to move him up in the search engine world. Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed that Google seems to be biasing much more towards the commercial sites and away from the useful ones recently? I'm going to have to explore alternate search engines again, it's getting hard to find good technical information any more.

I was reading an article somewhere showing how WebLogs were shoing up prominantly in Google search because of their inate properties (updating often, good content to link ratio's) and they were working on ways to offset that tendancy.

Google seems to have been tweaking things lately, mostly because of the google- bombing phenomenon, but I think part of the problem is that there are more bloggers linking to stuff that isn't technical.

A few years back, most blogs out there would have a decent number of links pointing to good technical information. Not so much now. I'm pretty sure that shifts google in a way I'm not necessarily happy about.

Perhaps when you do find good technical information, linking to it will move it up in the search results, making it easier to find. One person doing that isn't going to help a lot, but zero people doing it is guaranteed not to help.

Hey, I could probably increase Flutterby's influence tremendously by registering a few domains, using Babelfish to translate Flutterby to a different language for each domain, then back to English, and post it on all those domains. Hmmmmm...

On Google

for technical info, back when I was searching for lots of details on Windows programming I used to use Hotbot to much better effect than Google

. Alas, it's now owned by Lycos and seems to have no coverage any more. My problem with covering technical stuff in the 'blog is that usually the answer is in some mailing list archive, and those things are notoriously unstable.

Mailing list archives are a real problem. Especially ones which are closed or private lists. If random people aren't allowed to access the archives, the search engine can't help you, either.

But perhaps the stuff you're looking for is in the deja/google archives of Usenet? I'd try the newgroup archives before giving up.

The topic of Manipulating Google Adwords ala Search Engine Manipulation has recently been addressed on Slashdot and The Register as well as now: User Friendly. What blows my mind is that they have supposdly been paying actual people to click on links..

The newest use of scripts like the one above that I have been informed of is to cost a competitor lots of money for an adword combination, so that they drop those 'search words' to show up for, as it's costing them lots of money for the clicks, but they are not selling anything. Leaving your ad in place.