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Slashback: Nigritude, Indignation, Artifacts
How to not make friends and influence rankings. Ben Michel contributes an update to the search-engine optimization (SEO) contest mentioned last month, the object of which was for contestants to create a site ranked highest by google for a nonsense phrase, "nigritude ultramarine."
Michel writes "The first phase of the competition ended last Monday, and the winner was the owner of a forum called nigritude ultramarine--previously known as Merkey.net. According to Brandon Suit, the owner of this forum, the key to his winning strategy was "getting high PR backlinks"--having other websites with high Page Ranks link to him and vice versa.
What impact does this have on SEO, and indeed for the rapidly growing search industry in general? The viability of certain underhanded methods in the pursuit of SEO has been clearly reinforced by many of the results of the contest--both Suit and his closest competitor, Philipp Lenssen, posted links in Wiki Sandboxes in order to better their standing. According to Suit, "If you want to manipulate [Google], you can." While search engines certainly have come a long ways from relevance-based searching, it seems that they still have significant changes to make before they can more accurately order results for any given query. The search engines' creators themselves must make countless revisions in their own, perhaps quixotic, quests to create the perfect tools to retrieve relevant data in the vast, ever-expanding realm of the internet."
However, not everyone is as matter-of-fact about this method of increasing search-engine visibility; May Kasahara is one of the webmasters and wiki users who isn't.
Kasahara writes: "The Search Engine Optimization contest previously mentioned on Slashdot has had a detrimental effect on wiki users and admins (including myself) lately , as the words 'Nigritude Ultramarine' have been showing up in wiki sandboxes across the web. A search on UseModWiki's homepage brought me to this informative entry, which in turn led me to Nigritude Ultramarine and the Wiki Sandbox Effect [note -- mentioned last week on Slashdot] and to these accompanying comments, mostly from very annoyed wiki users."
OK, so maybe "infinite" was a strong word. Prof.Phreak writes "Quoting wikipedia: On May 26, 2004, Richard Arenstorf of Vanderbilt University submitted a 38-page proof that there are, in fact, infinitely many twin primes. On June 3, Michel Balazard of Bordeaux reported that Lemma 8 on page 35 is false.[1] As is typical in mathematical proofs, the defect may be correctable or a substitute method may repair or replace the defect. Arenstorf withdrew his proof on June 8, noting "A serious error has been found in the paper, specifically, Lemma 8 is incorrect"."
What are these dashed lines all over your sacred cow? reifman writes "Slashdot's link to my article in the Seattle Weekly helped generate 175,000 page views and numerous letters and comments. The article seemed to touch a nerve in the Mac and Linux communities. I've posted a follow up responding to people's letters."
Updates from the Academic Affairs Division. zenrandom writes "As Case Western has just recently been reported, we may as well mention the initiative that will be connecting many schools in Ohio. Oarnet, a part of the Ohio Supercomputer Center and The Ohio State University is building a statewide academic and research fiber optic network. Composed of multiple metro-rings and over 1600 miles of fiber."
In unrelated college news, Mirell writes "After the FBI previously investigated an open records request filed for the tunnel blueprints at UT, students decide instead to enter via brute force. Hooligans - 1, War Against Terror - 0."
The problem with opening Pandora's Box. WC writes "The previous review on JDS2 ended with no successful installation so it wasn't very helpful on what to expect from the Sun distro. This new review has got a working installation but with a slew of new problems: more installation woes, unusable networking, buggy Nautilus and Mozilla window resizing artifacts among others. The author concludes that JDS2 is --effectively-- nothing but JDS 1.1 with the added Sun server software on top, but the desktop part has the same (and more) issues like JDS1 had."
Looking innocent is not their strong suit. tbase writes "As reported on News.com.com, Claria, formerly known as Gator, has sued L.L. Bean, charging the retailer with filing a frivolous lawsuit against its advertisers. As covered in a previous Slashdot story, L.L. Bean has filed suit against current and former Claria advertisers for advertising via pop ups over L.L. Bean's site."
Well, I know one way to get great results. All you have to do it be Litigious bastards and you're set.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
Arenstorf withdrew his proof on June 8, noting "A serious error has been found in the paper, specifically, Lemma 8 is incorrect".
I guess that Lemma turned out to be a real Lemon, eh?
*symbol crash* ba-dom-bom
Thank you! I'll be here all week!
Idea of having lots of high-ranking back-links is most certainly an effective one. I used to have a plain old personal homepage, which was ranked as '1' by google, and then I added a link to my site on my page at h2g2, and watched my rank go up to 4 within a week. Sadly, it didn't last...
Half time - change sides....
I wonder what the half time pep talk would have been like in the Claria camp:
Now troops, we're going to need to pay for filing motions, and all that other stuff that comes along with suing someone, as well as our defence lawyers.
WADDYA MEAN WE SPENT IT ALL ON REBRANDING???....oh that's right (*fights through the fog of denial*)...we were Gator *blushes*
The Mothership
Darl let it be known today in the conference call that he uses google to search the net.
Apparently they irony of that, seeing how Darl's position is that ''linux is destroying the foundation of the industry!'', is completely lost on him.
The sandbox is a junk area where users can play right? So change the .htaccess to use Follow, NoIndex and google should be blind to them. Or the robots.txt file to block access.
Is there some reason you would want the Sandbox indexed?
It seems, unfortunately, that comment #9393632, story #110689, is wrong. Simply take v_0=1, r(v):=(1+\cos v)/\sqrt v, \rho(v)=3/\sqrt v, and \phi(v)=v. I imagine that such a mistake has heavy consequences.
Sincerely,
Letter
After a joke like that? Not if someone gets you with those symbols first...
Except that nigritude actually has to do with blackness (at least the color), whereas the more vulgar sounding "niggardly" has nothing to do with color or race. However, contrast the neologism negritude which is about blackness in racial terms.
In any case, Microsoft has given software away for ages. Suddenly because they gave away IE, the world is on track to become evil purveyors of stolen... things.
If that isn't ironic I don't know what is.
You would think that someone like Sun has nerves,resources,etc. to pull a decent Linux desktop.
The reasons it is not are probably combination of:
internal apathy of the development group - Linux, desktop, whatever.. Any AC from Sun can comment?
cluelessness of the upper management - there is no marketing plan, they just grasping the straws
wrong marketing (different from cluelessness). Wtf it is called "Java"? To me, JDS would mean a Swing-based desktop shell on top of very thin Linux distro. Now, that would be innovation.
Overall, the JDS just confirms the point that you do not have to be a multi-billion-dollar co to produce major product and when you ARE a m-b-d co, your product may still suck. The innovation is the field owned by talented individuals and hungry startups.
Jesus, does everything have to be a Homeland Security issue and tied to 9-11?
Whatever happened to harmless breaking and entering? Really, what the hell is the impotent Homeland Security department going to do? Guard the tunnel entrances? Overreact and send the students to Git-mo?
Terrorism is old and busted, and is nothing but a political tool and soundbite op.
Those who respond, "tell that to the victims of 9-11", I submit that if all those people were here today they would be pretty fucking pissed at all the unconstitutional bullshit that has been done in their name.
...does everything have to be a Homeland Security issue and tied to 9-11?
Only so long as it works...
Remember It's for the children! ?
<grrr>
Why do they not just disable links to outside pages entirely? It is experimental, right? So why have links to other websites at all?
Links could create a bogus page like:
Internal links within the wiki could be preserved.All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Recently my local computer user group's blog was spammed with user registration. The same user registered about 200 times with slightly different user names and all his home pages linked to the same website. The user never needed to post a single comment in our forums, just the registration page alone gave him 200 links to his home page.
If you wanna read a more detailed account of how this works, read here.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
...made all searches for nigritude ultramarine return results in a random order, shouldn't be that hard for them to do, would have been side splittingly funny as well, hah...SEO spammers...take that, and heres another one for your pointless competition ;o)
I am NaN
Links could create a bogus page like:
you have linked to the URL: http://somesite.wherever.net
That's not very helpful because it would be difficult to test the link that way. The idea is to encourage legitimate users to actually make and edit pages.
It is unfortunate that Wiki site administrators have to do anything at all. Phillip admits that he does not get it:
I still don't understand why something like a newsgroup alt.test could possibly be hurt from anything (spam, backlink-postings, whatever) but I guess I still don't get it.
Phill, baby, it's rude to use other people and expect them to clean up your mess. As many of the posters stated, Wiki administrators did not set up their service for your purposes and you caused them grief. I can't believe you said this after apologizing.
He also insults Wiki software itself:
In any case it seems Wiki software is not up to handle these things.
Bad attitude, Phill. You bragged about how clever you were, how about comming up with a solution instead? Someone might even give you an ipod or something.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
With the author having withdrawn the twin primes paper in the wake of the discovered flaw, arXiv no longer has the original up so we can see what went wrong. Does anyone have a mirror?
Some poor grad student isn't gonna be very much liked by his board. They usually have grad students bitch out lemmas like this - but I might be wrong. If I'm right though, some poor schlub is being handed a Master's and shown the door. Piled Higher and Deeper indeed.
friends don't let friends use linearly dependent row vectors.
Indeed, as a non-american and certainly someone who's not inside (except for my girlfriend living in the states)
Dear Reichsminister Ashcroft,
As you can see from the above, the terrorists -- or foreigners, hey, no real difference -- are stealing our pure American women now.
Please arrest this self-admitted anti-American woman-poacher and send him for some non-torture (because it's not illegal even if it breaks a law if the President says it's ok) "mechanical persuasion application" in Guantanamo, so that real Americans like myself can date his girlfriend.
If you do this, I promise not to do anything with her than you think is immoral, like dancing or criticizing the government, and to make her my submissive wife in accordance with God's desires as explained in the Holy Scriptures.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
"Terrorism is old and busted, and is nothing but a political tool and soundbite op."
In a political sense, yes. In a practical sense, not on your life. Just like "the war on drugs" was mostly a political tool, there was a REAL underlying problem that existed (and still exists). Just because some polish up phrases and use them as soundbites doesn't mean the root cause isn't important.
There's some very real people out there that want to do some very real harm to our very real civilians. Are they as numerous as people say? No. Are people be incorrectly persecuted in this country for it? Yes. But taking away the injustices, there's STILL a core group of real people wanting to mass murder US civilians. Ignoring the issue just because it's a political soundbite is almost as dangerous as ignoring the injustices.
I'll bite. However I'll prolly get killed for this one..
"Nigri-please?!"
Nigritude, ouch...
Playing with fire. Expect the wrath of the NAACP
anyday now. Remember the guy who actually got
fired for using the word niggardly?
Why is it that every time that a 'War' is declared, we end up fighting the symptoms of the problems and not the root causes?
We'd probably be somewhat safer from terrorists if we'd stop training them and giving them weapons...
After a few years mapping what entrances were visible, we found a grate that had been left open, so those of us who dared went for a jaunt.
They must have had silent alarms aswell (I saw the sensors) so I knew we wouldn't have long. The group split in two and went opposite directions (the central tunnel is a large ring circumnavigating the great court). A couple of security guards came noisily blundering along the tunnel towards my girlfriend and I, but then they heard they other group and took off after them, not noticing us lurking in the shadows of an alcove.
The other group made it to a service entrance before the guards caught up, and we scurried back out the original grate. All in all a fun day at Uni.
Note for law enforcement: This is an ENTIRELY FICTIONAL account of something that NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
It's like the Reichstags fire in the Weimar Republic (Germany). Blamed on "them nasty jews" and used as an excuse to round up undesireables and put them into concentration camps. You'll eventually find out that America is not one iota better, and that you have given up just as many rights as the Germans did in 1933. Sure, sure, you are still allowed to vote; but as long as they count the votes what are you going to do about it?
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
I agree with you, teamhasnoi. A couple nights ago I watched Ashcroft squirm while Congress grilled him (replayed from that morning on CSpan). Boy that was high entertainment. (He almost got jail time for "Contempt of Congress. ;) But what really caught my attention when he protested that some Patriot Act provision (something to do with police hijinks sans subpoena) was just an extension to terrorism of what they already could do with health insurance fraud. Health insurance fraud!
Sound like some congress critter owned by the insurance industry already signed away our rights long before 911. I wouldn't be too surprised (now) to find that a lot of the Patriot Act's more odious provisions were simply preexisting cracks widened by it and 911.
As for the terrorists (the real ones, not the PR ones), apply what's in my sig to our foreign policy, and that little problem should clear itself up. What's sauce for the King of Terror, is sauce for the terrorists. True peace alone (not Bush's fraud) can conquer both. Not peace with terror, but peace with people so their hatred and anger isn't stirred to empower terror. Rumsfeld, in a memo, has already noted that the War on Terror (and especially in Iraq) is stirring up so much hatred and anger that they are making terrorists faster than we can kill them.
"Lola, kindness is not enough, look for the reason of hatred and anger.
When you find and understand that, love becomes the strongest power; stronger than courage or wisdom."
Belabera, "Mothra 3: King Ghidora Attacks"
Seems like both search algorithms suffer from low self-esteem.
I guess nobody figures on people searching for search engines anyway...
There seems to be a growing trend of people interviewing themselves as a rhetorical technique. Does John Ashcroft do it every time he's on TV? Yes he does. Is it an effective means of controlling the direction of the interview? You bet. Is it starting to grate on my nerves? Absolutely! Will it get old and go away soon? We can only hope.
(Yeah, it's off-topic, but when the topic is "Nigritude Ultramarine", so is pretty much everything else)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Hey - let's ignore the Windows-based warez scene. Windows freeware, shareware, and spyware. Let's not bother ourselves with how gleefull Winnuts get when Microsoft slips them CDs of the latest Enterprise app or OS at a Cert class, tech talk, or conference. After all, liking free stuff is solely the domain of the OSS crowd.
And since this exists within the OSS crowd, obviously its all about money. Forget all those high-hat morals and ideals. Its all about being cheap. Nevermind professionals who deploy OSS even though they have access to budgets that enable them to pick from any option available.
Pot, kettle, black.
You might want to go back over what you quoted. In the litany of "free" stuff, it includes:
One could easily take this statement and place blame on OSS for putting the world on track "to become evil purveyors of stolen... things." In fact, that sounds awfully like the arguments put forward by Darl McBride and Ken Brown. Suddenly that quote doesn't quite have the MS-bash tone to it anymore.
Of course, if you weren't so busy trying to mine the article for propoganda, you might have caught on to a good point. Whether Microsoft started the process or contributed to it... today they have a serious problem. They have to fight more than a product put forward by IBM or Novell or Redhat, et al. They have to battle a perception that the OS itself is as much a commodity as the hardware it runs on. If Microsoft is unable to stop this shift in perception, they will face the same kind of upset IBM faced when its market became a commodity.
Now THAT is ironic.