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[humorix] *****SPAM***** The Don't-Pay-For-Placement Search Engine
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The Don't-Pay-For-Placement Search Engine
October 8, 2003
With a motto of "I'm Not Feeling Lucky -- Just Give Me The
Damn Results", a new search engine has been launched that
features a "virtually cheat-proof" page ranking system.
"It's so simple I can't believe nobody else has thought of
it," explained Eric Phenatic, lead programmer for the new
system. "Our system looks for any website that has paid
money to have a prominent listing on another search engine.
These sites are immediately flagged as 'marketing tripe'
and will not appear anywhere within our site except maybe
on page 52,534."
The new engine was born about three months ago when
Phenatic checked his email one day and found 9,123 spam
messages. Vowing to put an end to this nonsense, he then
went to his favorite search engine and tried to search for
"anti-spam filter", only to discover that the first 739
results were all sleazy sites hocking dubious mortgage
refinancing services and you-know-what enlargement
products.
"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" he
wrote in a Usenet post, only to see his mailbox flooded
with even more spam a few seconds later.
Today, Phenatic and his team of other mad-as-hell Linux
programmers launched an alpha version of their new system.
"We're not sure what to call it," he said. "It appears
that every domain name of six letters or less has already
been taken, and every meaningful phrase of less than five
words has already been trademarked. Until we think of
something, we're code-naming it 'Shovel' -- the search
engine that shovels all the crap away so you don't have
to."
Shovel works by employing two spiders -- one to crawl the
Web at large, and one to only crawl other search engines.
"Our philsophy is simple -- do the exact opposite of MSN,
Yahoo, and other engines where money is more important than
content."
In addition to its patent-pending "don't-pay-for-placement"
page ranking algorithm, the new system also employs an
innovative "<body> odor" ranking scheme.
"We all know that 95% of everything is crap. But our code
can smell the HTML code and immediately detect and
eliminate the crap," Phenatic boasted.
First, each prospective site is run through an HTML
validator. While the system is somewhat lenient (nobody is
perfect, and a misplaced forward slash is not the end of
the world), those sites that fail spectacularly are
immediately rejected. "Crappy code is a clear sign of
crappy content," Phenatic said.
Next, the site is tested with a grammar and spelling
checker. "A lot of spam sites consist of little more than
a list of hidden keywords, which are obviously not written
in complete sentences and will quickly fail the grammar
test," Phenatic explained. "We've also tweaked the grammar
checker to flag 'marketese'. A sentence like, 'We plan to
aggressively incentivize our enhanced image perception to
leverage postmodern market-driven paradigms' will
immediately be tagged as 'non-English' and the page will be
unranked accordingly."
Finally, the system will compare the page with other pages
that have already been rejected. "Spammers like to post
stuff at one domain that is really just a front for a
totally different domain -- but we can see right through
that. Our search engine will not list any sites that
redirect to other sites which redirect to other sites which
provide links which redirect to other sites which are all
owned by a front company operating out of a P.O. box in
Bermuda. It's not going to happen."
Once version 1.0 of the new search engine is fully launched
later this year, Phenatic hopes to extend his ideas to junk
e-mail. "Instead of blacklisting and Bayesian filters,
what we really need is a good spelling and grammar checking
system for incoming email. Nigerian scams,
private-part-enlargement ads, and get-rich-quick promotions
all share one thing in common: exceptionally poor spelling
and grammar.
Mrs. Mariam Abacha, wife of the late Nigerian head of
state, Gen. Sanni Abacha, desperately seeking an American
business partner to help smuggle billions of dollars from
Nigeria, was unavailable for comment at press time.
--
Humorix: Linux and Open Source(nontm) on a lighter note
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