BGAMUG Application Review

I report on always free, always no-brand, always open source widgets for the Bowling Green Area Microcomputer User Group

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Google Wannabees and Highway Trickery

Like any good curmudgeon, I'm ranting here for the sound of my clacking keyboard. There's no complaint department for the internet and blah blah blah. Maybe just a "Yeah that bugs me too" on reply would help me spread the pain around.

But don't meta search pages just really boil you to the bone? These are the pages that come up when you spell a URL slightly wrong - where evil webmasters have machinated on-the-fly websites that sort of look like a search page, but really aren't. Because a lot of folks type in URLs wrong - we're only human - the target page even kindof looks like it might be the page you were after. Example: I typed in what I thought was http://yourkrogerbenefits.com, but it arrived at http://yourkrogerbenfits.com, dropping the middle 'e' in benefits. Even just now when I was typing that, it came out wrong. Visiting the latter brings you to this metapage filled with links that apparently people went searching for, thinking they were at the correct site.

I'm pretty sure there's some spyware out there that actually encourages the misspelling of URLs - file this under "paranoid delusions." If it's not out there, some bad boy is thinking about it.

Folks, there are no companies that care behind these sites - they are totally automated with no employees, and they have no product to sell and no value to offer. They don't even want to be Google, the perps throwing up these sites just want you to click, click and click some more. Actually they really don't want you to find what you are looking for, because then maybe you will come back to this faux page and try again. A sponsored link is money in someone's pocket just for the click of a mouse, and there are hundreds of ways to camo a link to make you think it's what you wanted. The guys that code these sites should be consigned to the basement of Big Lots and be forced to sleep on mouse pads. They are a class of active spammers that are reducing the Internet to a worldwide carnival midway. It doesn't help that anyone with $10 can buy a domain name.

So maybe someone will read this and come up with a spellchecker that will automatically correct URLs that were mistyped. Version 2.0 will auto-update itself with a "no-go" list maintained by anti-spam organizations.

Thanks for tolerating this. Sometimes I just need to get it out there.

Mike

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