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But sniff... I'm going to miss this.

The funny thing is, the campaign didn't just googlebomb the phrase "litigious bastards" - it even bombed the word litigious by itself. :)

While it is hilarious that SCO takes #1

This isn't by accident.....

http://www.litigiousbastards.com/

Duh - have you been under a rock for the last twelve-plus months?

http://www.litigiousbastards.com

Actually, if you think about it, what we want is "SCO" to point to "litigiousbastards.com" as people are more likely to search for "SCO" than "litigious bastards". Join the fight! Visit SCO's website!

Sucks that Google apparently keeps manually hacking their results for this term, though.

The original bomb was supposed to be both words (litigious bastards), but enough people made links to their site that both litigious and bastards point to SCO as the first hits.

Two more examples of successful google bombs are French Military Victories (especially funny if you use Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button, like this), and Miserable Failure (this one used to have Bush as the first hit, but pro-bush folks seem to have pushed Michael Moore to number 1).

a fool and his money are soon parted.

You knew something was wrong with this program when quotes from Laura DiDio started popping up. She seems to provide her "insight" for the truly desperate. Indeed, before this praise, it seemed like she was playing good cop/bad cop with them to get more sales for licenses. Judging from this article, I guess it worked.

Assuming this is an accurate and actual letter, how is it that a company can continue to do business in this manner? This company is not in the softwrae business anymore - it's in the lawsuit business. After all the happenings with Enron and WorldCom, how is it that this company, which has no real business plan (that's evident even outside the letter) attract customers or money?

Along those lines, if their strategy is to just replace any real products with creative lawsuits and complex money raising schemes as described, perhaps people should replace the litigious bastards Google-bomb with "the Enron of Software" or "the next Enron" and start referring to them as such.

If that happened, I could see the mainstream press printing nice little asides like -- "...SCO and the Canopy Group are often described as "the next Enron" or the "Enron of Software" by members of the tech community..."

Maybe the litigiousbastards.com guys could buy up nextenron.com and enronofsoftware.com (unless SCO or Canopy already plan to as part of their positioning campaign!).

PageRank weeds out a lot of spammer sites, but it didn't weed out the litigious bastards thing by itself. Google Management made a decision to remove the SCO link, but did nothing to remove the links about the Google Bomb. If PageRank had thought the litigious bastards campaign had been spam, it would have weeded out all pages that linked using the litigious bastards phrase. Currently, if you do a search for litigious bastards on Google, the first link that shows up is my own website, www.litigiousbastards.com

Personally, I really can't fault Google for their decision, but I wish they would have left it up. If Google wanted to, it could easily filter out the sites for miserable failure, french military victories, etc.

Remember people, they are litigious bastards. More info

Google does that too... Hence the Litigious Bastards campaign was able to get the term associated with SCO's homepage, until SCO specifically asked Google to clean up for them.

When you search for "litigious bastards", you now get a website promoting the googlebomb technique listed first. The sco group was listed first, but now it's ranked about 47. I'm not sure if they are reducing the relevance of the link-text, or if the ranking has been lowered because the sco group probably doesn't point back at any of the blogs that link to it.

Google has apparently noticed, and now neither litigious bastards or just plain bastards comes up with SCO. (This may not yet be true on all Google mirrors.)

Here is a sad update: It's not working any more
You can check out the screen shot though:

From litigiousbastards.com:
"Update: Unfortunately, it looks like Google wised up and removed SCO from the results list for a litigious bastards search. Here's a screenshot of the results of a "litigious bastards" search on January 27, 2004, when SCO was still the first result."

Google has apparently noticed, and now neither litigious bastards or just plain bastards comes up with SCO. (This may not yet be true on all Google mirrors.)

Here is a sad update: It's not working any more
You can check out the screen shot though:

From litigiousbastards.com:
"Update: Unfortunately, it looks like Google wised up and removed SCO from the results list for a litigious bastards search. Here's a screenshot of the results of a "litigious bastards" search on January 27, 2004, when SCO was still the first result."

Well done! One thought that occurs to me is that you could consider running a reverse google-bomb as well as in The SCO Group (or variations) giving The SCO Group. Right now the people that find your site are the typing 'litigious bastards' which means they already know about the efforts to affect rankings, however, someone just looking for information about SCO will not currently find your site.

Well done! One thought that occurs to me is that you could consider running a reverse google-bomb as well as in The SCO Group (or variations) giving The SCO Group. Right now the people that find your site are the typing 'litigious bastards' which means they already know about the efforts to affect rankings, however, someone just looking for information about SCO will not currently find your site.

We did it! It works!

Ummm... no it didn't: Give it a shot

I'm confused... I've seen a few other places claiming that it worked too. Most notably is www.litigiousbastards.com where they say that it worked too.

So if it works so well, why doesn't it work when I try it? Anyone know?

Well, as proprietor of some anti-SCO websites, let me weigh in here:

ARE YOU IDIOTS INSANE?

(FYI, I am a college student, U of W @ Madison) I didn't hear about this new virus until now. But at about 4:30 PM today, I get this email from an attractive, intelligent female friend of mine from high school. She goes to Knox College in Illinois. (Let's call her Kristin) The email is listed below in it's entirety, but basically it says watch out for this new virus. So I figure, OK, maybe some stupid Bagle (Beagle, whatever) virus variation has come out, and computer illiterate college students haven't figured out how to push the big Update button on their virus scanners. No biggie.

So late evening, around 6:30 PM, I go to a student government meeting (contrary to published doctrine, some college students actually give a shit about what's happening in the world.) I get back, check /., and what do I see? A virus attacking SCO!

Now, I think everyone here knows I dislike SCO. I own websites that are anti-them (Check my sig, the scolawsuit.com link above, and Litigiousbastards.com linking campaign. But this is not the type of publicity we need. This gives SCO more ammunition, when it needs less. Guess what? The public equates viruses like this to terrorism. The average Joe Sixpack will think "Oh, this poor company's getting hurt by terrorism! These gosh darn Linux assholes are terrorists!" Can you say Guantanamo Bay?

If you want to DOS someone, do something constructive like sending an email to a Congressman/woman, donate to Groklaw.

(And yes, I must admit, and in the spirit of fairness, I was laughing out loud when I saw this article)

My friend's letter:

Hey everyone - Just something you might want to be aware of even with the virus protection software that you have. School is going well, and I am really enjoying myself here. I have a lot of work, but I am having fun. I even had a bat in my room, which was interesting. Ok, time to go back and do homework.

Kristin

=Original Message=
From: "M. Sean Riedel"
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 15:59:33 -0600

A new virus, yet to be named, is spreading quickly and has slipped by many AntiVirus applications. If you have received a message with the following parameters, delete it immediately without opening the attachment. You will only become infected if you open the attachment.

The common factor in its profile is that it carries an unsolicited attachment. So far we have seen filenames of "body", "data", "document", "file", "glszfj", "message", "readme", "test", "text", "vgsu042a", and "vncexdl" attached to messages all with either the .pif, .scr, .zip file extensions.

We already ban extensions of .pif or .scr. Until the antivirus companies release the definition files to detect this new virus, we are banning the .zip extension also. As soon as our vendors update the definition files, we will remove the ban on the .zip extension.

As always, if you receive messages with attachments from anyone you do not know or unexpected attachments from people you do know, don't open them. If the message is from an unknown party, just delete it. If it is from someone you know, verify with that person that the attachment was intended since many viruses will forge the sender.

M. Sean Riedel
Computer Center
Knox College

At SCO Countdown, I have a countdown to SCO's self imposed deadline for suing a Linux end user (I doubt that a Novell lawsuit can be counted as a end user suit), so remember, SCO has to file another lawsuit in 28 days or it misses it's deadline. In addition, after that litigious bastards campaign that was started on /. a few days ago, I acquired that domain and threw up a quick page.

Remember, link link link!