Slashdot Mirror

Now for the fun part. Every time you click an Overture result, you cause the advertiser to pay Overture. As mentioned at SpamBattle, this is a great way to screw companies that sell spam software or services:

• bulk email
• email marketing
• million email
• opt-in

Use the /. effect to bankrupt spammers!

Now for the fun part. Every time you click an Overture result, you cause the advertiser to pay Overture. As mentioned at SpamBattle, this is a great way to screw companies that sell spam software or services:

• bulk email
• email marketing
• million email
• opt-in

Use the /. effect to bankrupt spammers!

Now for the fun part. Every time you click an Overture result, you cause the advertiser to pay Overture. As mentioned at SpamBattle, this is a great way to screw companies that sell spam software or services:

• bulk email
• email marketing
• million email
• opt-in

Use the /. effect to bankrupt spammers!

I just tried a few searches at Overture, and every one stacked what looked like product placements at the top of the responses. And in fact this notice introduced the results pages.

It looks as though they're buying the underperforming search sites for their paid customer lists, which they offer to other search sites that take placement graft.

They're not a search technology company. They're a search-result astroturf company. Their business model is selling ad space camouflaged as content.

The internet is not secure as either a medium or a message.

I just tried a few searches at Overture, and every one stacked what looked like product placements at the top of the responses. And in fact this notice introduced the results pages.

It looks as though they're buying the underperforming search sites for their paid customer lists, which they offer to other search sites that take placement graft.

They're not a search technology company. They're a search-result astroturf company. Their business model is selling ad space camouflaged as content.

The internet is not secure as either a medium or a message.

Overture's search engine has sponsored links and regular links, though they mix them in a bit more than Google does. Link sponsors bid on how much they're willing to pay per click-through, and the sponsored links get sorted by high bid. (And with Overture, the last time I checked, they had a policy that the three highest bidders for a set of keywords get sponsored as advertising on Google searches for the same keywords.) Various people have commmented that this can be used to bash spammers. Go search for bulk email or some similar spammer-advertising phrase, and check out how much they're paying - typically the top couple bidders for that term are in the $2-5 range, though I've occasionally seen it as high as $15 (presumably a badly automated bidding war?), and the next dozen are usually $1 or more. So open a new Mozilla session, open the top few dozen sponsored links in new tabs, reject cookies from the spammers, let it download for a while to be sure they're all there, and then kill off the window. Then go back in to Mozilla and kill off the cookies you've gotten from overture, since they do have various anti-abuse protections to keep people from hacking the searching mechanisms (e.g. to discourage people from using this to bash their customers....) I don't know if they also track IP addresses, but you can be creative. Also check them out using Google.

Slashdot them bankrupt!

Click all the adverts, they are ads for spamware/spamming. The 1000's of clicks slashdot could generate will really hurt their cash flow!

Want to hurt them more? Click here!

We had fun last week dissing Alan Ralsky, the spammer that everybody's now signing up for spam. Previous Slashdot articles on harassing spammers point out that Overture.com accepts bids from advertisers for top positions in their search results, and the top three positions get sold on Google, MSN, etc. - So if you search for "bulk email" and click the first couple of links, each one costs the advertiser (who's presumably a spammer) whatever their bid is - typically a few bucks. For some reason, "bulk email" is having a bidding war - today's prices were over $25. The system is designed to detect multiple clickthroughs by the same person (which is why I'm not providing a direct link), but once you've got all those ads for spamware on your screen, you might as well give them the name of a promising lead - like Ralsky...

Where Google baffles you with the vastness of results page, Overture search gives a helpful hand.

Hurt the spammers here!

find DeCss, just like a google search or searching Disney's Go.

As soon as Disney found out that people were using its GO.com Infoseek search engine to look for DeCSS, which could decrypt Disney DVD titles, Disney killed Infoseek and went with Overture.

It didn't help. Overture takes you straight to DeCSS as well, in both flavors (DVD and HTML).

Go to http://www.overture.com and search for 'bulk email'. Then click on each of the links. Do this once every day. The amount this will cost each spammer is displayed on the search results page.

I am a programmer who ended up out of a job. My resume was great, but businesses aren't looking at what you can actually do anymore or what skills you have. So I decided to start my own business.

DataDino is a product I developed that is similar to Toad, but allows you to connect to multiple databases. We've sold a few copies so far and expect business to gradually pick up. Here are a few things I learned:

1. It takes time. If you can't hold out for more than six months, you'd better try working double shifts part-time.

2. Your success is partially dependent on how well your business is known. If people know you, they'll trust you and buy your product.

3. Try to have an open-door policy. With DataDino we use Bugzilla to allow people to request enhancements and new database support. People like this because it gives them feedback that you as a company actually listen to what they have to say.

4. You'll be tempted to pack a lot of helpful text into your web page and advertising materials. Don't do this. Try to pack actionable items into as small a space as possible. (e.g. I used to explain what Java Web Start was before I offered to option to run the program. Now there's just a big red plunger that says GO.)

5. Marketing is a hellva hard thing to do. It's challenging and one wrong step can tarnish your company's name. Make sure you are getting the biggest bang for your buck off of every advertising dollar, and make sure that none of it is likely to offend your users.

I highly recommend two tasks to get you going. The first is to attend a StoresOnline seminar when they come to your area. These guys make money off of people with successful online businesses, so their seminars are very helpful. You might want to check out this link before you buy into their offer tho.

The second is subscribe to SiteProNews. There's a lot of helpful statistics and info that pours out of their articles, so you probably want to check it out.

Good Luck!

Go to http://www.overture.com.
Search for 'bulk email'.
Click on every link which comes up.
The amount each click costs the spammers is displayed in US dollars on the search results page.
Do this every day. I recommend NOT accepting any cookies from Overture or any of their customers, as sooner or later they will figure out what we are doing and this approach will be thwarted.

They already have!

Click here. Unless you want the starwars DVD early

Click this link. This is where the spamware authors advertise their vile services. Use the slashdot effect, click every link and make them pay!

They exploit us geeks!

yeah Disney's go.com

It's simply amazing that this got them in trouble.

Google Search Engine

Yahoo has blocked the search of DeCSS

Lycos

Altavista

MetaCrawler

Go. Now Overture. Owned By Disney/ABC

CNet (Search.com)

Add Any I left out :-)

Its kind of fun to see what people search for. I tried typing in "XXX". The top 4 searches were:

• free xxx
• xxx password
• free xxx picture
• free xxx movie

It is a really good thing that the court has protected the movie studios by stopping people from linking to DeCSS!. I mean what kind of chaos could ensue if people could link to and find a copy of this evil program? I mean even companies like Disney would go out of business if people kept distributing this program! I am so glad that linking to DeCSS is a crime! I feel much safer now.

Better technology? Or more profitability?

Of course, many moons ago, Google themselves delivered RealNames results, as did Altavista and others.

But then the paid-for-placement leanings of Overture nee Goto became more tempting, and ultimately triumphed. Why make only cents per click, when you can make much more from fools willing to pay more?

To say Microsoft killed Realnames is a simplification. MS may have been Realnames's biggest customer, but they were at death's door regardless.

rOD.

Better technology? Or more profitability?

Of course, many moons ago, Google themselves delivered RealNames results, as did Altavista and others.

But then the paid-for-placement leanings of Overture nee Goto became more tempting, and ultimately triumphed. Why make only cents per click, when you can make much more from fools willing to pay more?

To say Microsoft killed Realnames is a simplification. MS may have been Realnames's biggest customer, but they were at death's door regardless.

rOD.

Oh, there are worse:

Dedicated servers

Then there are really cheap ones that are just fun to click on:

Scientology

Oh, there are worse:

Dedicated servers

Then there are really cheap ones that are just fun to click on:

Scientology

Data recovery may be the most expensive, but clicking on bulk email is more fun. 10 clicks for $30.46, that's a deal!

Data recovery is one of the most expensive search results on Overture that I've seen.

I don't know how much it costs for a day of blowjobs, but I can tell you they cost up to $0.21 each here

Google does not have a pay for placement plan - if you are making reference to the practice of changing the order of search results based on advertiser dollars.

Yes it does. When you search Google, it displays two distinct sets of results side-by-side. One set is based solely on PageRank values; the other (clearly marked "Sponsored Links") is based on advertising dollars. The problem with GoTo was that you had to scroll and click past pages and pages of sponsored links to get to the results scrolled by relevance.

Is that they give you no relevant results compared to others.

There was an article about Overture, I think on Slashdot, that had an interesting attack on spammers who use Overture's advertising. Go to their site overture.com and search for "bulk email" or some similar phrase like "opt-in email", and it'll give you a list of sites that are bidding some amount of money per web hit. The top three bidders for any given set of words also get advertised on several other search engines. Some spammers used to bid as much as $5 for hits, though the maximum today was down to like $2.75.

In the long run, attacks like this probably mainly result in loss of business for Overture :-), but meanwhile it's fun to have a simple method to beat up on some spammers.

There was an article about Overture, I think on Slashdot, that had an interesting attack on spammers who use Overture's advertising. Go to their site overture.com and search for "bulk email" or some similar phrase like "opt-in email", and it'll give you a list of sites that are bidding some amount of money per web hit. The top three bidders for any given set of words also get advertised on several other search engines. Some spammers used to bid as much as $5 for hits, though the maximum today was down to like $2.75.

In the long run, attacks like this probably mainly result in loss of business for Overture :-), but meanwhile it's fun to have a simple method to beat up on some spammers.

This interesting, though maybe not directly relavent: Overture has a direct comparison between their ad service and Google's ad service on their web page.

Also do a search for Overture on Google and you'll find both a link to Overture's advertising info page (that's I found the above comparison) and also at the top a news alert saying Overture is suing Google.

All I got to say is this:
Search Overture for Google

Go here (currently the third link on the page) and you can click on a link that will cost em 7 cents. Yeah, it's not that much, but if we all do it .... Remember, this only works once per day.

But, when Yahoo|Terra Lycos|MSN|AOL|Inktomi|Alta Vista put in a search result link to websites that that have paid to be listed first, you don't know if it's a "real" result, or if someone has paid to put it their.

Actually, you do. If you visit any of the sites you mentioned you will see that the "sponsored" links are set apart and labelled differently from the rest of the search results. And, *gasp*, they have a link that explains that these are sponsored results.

If you're really concerned, visit the source of all those evil, and relevant, sponsored results and you can see how much each advertiser is paying per click. Then, you can scroll down to the free listings and use those.

Seriously people, why would someone *pay* to direct traffic to their business web site if it wasn't traffic that's going to spend money?

Web site design needs a lot of different things, Information architecture & usability, HTML & XHTML, CSS & implementation bugs, search engine ideas and keyword research, Web server techniques & content management, deeziner discussion & tech discussion, good practices & sucky practices.

I could go on. My point is that you can either be a half-hearted jack-of-all-trades, or do the Web a favour and pick something, learn to understand it and collaborate with people who have complimentary skills.

Of course a Web site is no use if no one visits it. A link from the /. home page is a good start.

Calum

You can usually make the top 10 spammers on this list pay between $1 and $10 by clicking their link.

www.overture.com (formerly GoTo.com) is a search engine where advertisers pay for clickthroughs, and each search result shows you how much your click costs that advertiser (more $ == higher search ranking).

Search for "bulk email".

Click through the first 10 or so.

Multiply by the Slashdot Effect.

Smile.

(I am not associated with overture.com, nor is this an endorsement of their services. But anything that bleeds money from spammers is good IMHO).

Very, very wrong:

http://www.overture.com/d/search/?Keywords=terrori sm

Thomas Friedman on Terrorism
Six New York Times columns, published prior to the attack on September 11, on the threat of terrorism and the conflict in the Middle East. Subscription necessary.
www.nytimes.com (Cost to advertiser: $0.09)

Potassium Iodide Anti-Radiation Pill FAQ
Comprehensive nuclear accident/war radiation protection FAQ. Iodine formulations, OTC sources, prices. Free nuclear war survival skills book (280 pgs) online! Highly recommended visit!
www.ki4u.com (Cost to advertiser: $0.09)

Should We Retaliate against Terrorists?
Earn money by arguing on TheFence.com, the Internet's debate destination. Everything from politics to pop culture. We even rank you in six debate stats. Which side of The Fence are you on?
www.thefence.com (Cost to advertiser: $0.08)

You think that's good? Try searching for casino. $15 per click! woot!

Of course, I'm sure casinos can make up the money somehow. :)

At first, this article concerns me. "Search engines" like Overture that charge for listings seriously affect the quality of the services, as well as their integrity.

I hope google is paid per-click for the ad placements since it makes rapeping bulk email sites easier and the money goes to a better place.

I wonder how well the harvesters have thought out their coding in order to NOT spam the .gov addresses.

But seriously, I suppose they don't remove anything from harvested addresses. There are lots of obfuscated emails on the web, like user-no@spam.please-example.com or "contact shiny at key dot salt after cracking crypt(3)'ed plfeY04jaJnYI", where it would be almost impossible to to make a working algorithm understanding every method. But what is possible is collecting such addresses with SPAM in them for future manual processing, it could be even quite fast, if done well. However I don't thing they do this, for a simple reason: they don't want trouble makers. Trouble makers won't buy anything anyway and can cost them problems with ISPs, when they report every abuse. For the same reason there's no spam in my admin@ mailboxes.

This is a slogan from Spam-Free Emailing Service : "No need to worry about losing your ISP or getting into trouble, we do the mailing to safe email addresses only." So i think they don't want to spam people who have NOSPAM in their email.

For more spamming services, search Overture for "bulk email" and see such matches as e.g. "Increase Sales in 2002 with Bulk Email! 33-million e-mail addresses with order. Send up to 50,000 e-mails per hour with Prospect Mailer. Prospect Finder collects e-mail addresses based on keyword, profile or location. Free demos." for which people selling those emails are paying Overture $5.15/click (so don't forget to click them all every day!).

(if you want to automate clicking check out the Spam Victims Revenge, a little script which search Overture and click links with random delays. I don't know if it works, I suppose that Overture has more sophisticated methods to count clicks, but it's a cool idea anyway. However the manual method has to work, so imagine slashdotting these paid links... it could be the end of spam forever...)

But here's an idea: we can just call 1-800-359-0156 and ask if they have trouble makers on their lists...

I wonder how well the harvesters have thought out their coding in order to NOT spam the .gov addresses.

But seriously, I suppose they don't remove anything from harvested addresses. There are lots of obfuscated emails on the web, like user-no@spam.please-example.com or "contact shiny at key dot salt after cracking crypt(3)'ed plfeY04jaJnYI", where it would be almost impossible to to make a working algorithm understanding every method. But what is possible is collecting such addresses with SPAM in them for future manual processing, it could be even quite fast, if done well. However I don't thing they do this, for a simple reason: they don't want trouble makers. Trouble makers won't buy anything anyway and can cost them problems with ISPs, when they report every abuse. For the same reason there's no spam in my admin@ mailboxes.

This is a slogan from Spam-Free Emailing Service : "No need to worry about losing your ISP or getting into trouble, we do the mailing to safe email addresses only." So i think they don't want to spam people who have NOSPAM in their email.

For more spamming services, search Overture for "bulk email" and see such matches as e.g. "Increase Sales in 2002 with Bulk Email! 33-million e-mail addresses with order. Send up to 50,000 e-mails per hour with Prospect Mailer. Prospect Finder collects e-mail addresses based on keyword, profile or location. Free demos." for which people selling those emails are paying Overture $5.15/click (so don't forget to click them all every day!).

(if you want to automate clicking check out the Spam Victims Revenge, a little script which search Overture and click links with random delays. I don't know if it works, I suppose that Overture has more sophisticated methods to count clicks, but it's a cool idea anyway. However the manual method has to work, so imagine slashdotting these paid links... it could be the end of spam forever...)

But here's an idea: we can just call 1-800-359-0156 and ask if they have trouble makers on their lists...

Here

Click here and then each link on the page and the advertisers gets charged the amount shown in small print. But for a permanent solution: I want to charge people who send me email. I would obviously pay back all those people who send stuff I wanted to see, and not pay back those who pissed me off. What's the chance of this happening? It would be good.

Get your own back from SPAMMERS! Click the link and follow through to each of the SPAMMER's advertisments you wish to 'pay back' for their fine services. The cost to the SPAMMERS per click is displayed next to each advertisment. Only one click per day per person per advertisement is counted... http://www.overture.com/d/search/?type=home&Keywor ds=bulk+email

Get your own back from SPAMMERS! Click the link and follow through to each of the SPAMMER's advertisments you wish to 'pay back' for their fine services. The cost to the SPAMMERS per click is displayed next to each advertisment. Only one click per day per person per advertisement is counted... http://www.overture.com/d/search/?type=home&Keywor ds=bulk+email