Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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>
Or more likely an incompetant reviewer. I have had JDS2 running on several machines for over a week now and have not experienced a single one of the problems this reviewer mentioned.
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
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?
I have installed JDS on at least 5 machines at work, mostly low end 2 year old pc's, but also 1 v60x (dual booting suse). JDS seems pretty on target for Sun's stated market, i.e. limited functionality/requirements people. Call centers, hospitals, etc.... Basically, people who need word processing, spreadsheets, email, and and a browser. Sun is not targeting Slashdot readers for JDS users, although a some number us will probably end up administrating them. Sun is not trying to create a sexy, leading distribution, but instead is trying to replace (in their eyes) buggy, insecure, virus ridden, expensive windows machines. Of course, all slashdot readers know this, but still insist on judging the distribution on whether it meets their personal needs, including any wingnut hardware combination they may have. Of course its not a perfect distribution, but that's not Sun's pitch. They are going in to companies saying "Look, we have a product that is more secure, less expensive, and provides all the fuctionality your people need. Plus, we will support it, including phone support."
;-) across all their platforms, sparc, x86, and thin client (sun ray). Using the Java name is just a marketing thing now, but it could be more meaningfull (project looking glass, anyone?) in the future.
I think the "Java" in JDS is a hint that the linux base is not important to Sun. My guess is that they are trying to get to a Common Desktop Environment
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
I'll bite. However I'll prolly get killed for this one..
"Nigri-please?!"
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...
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.