News, Politics and Anything Else I Want to Say

Today, January 1st, 2008, there was a posting on Digg titled "January 1 TCP/IP". That posting is an example of Search Engine Spam at its finest.

That link caught my eye because it was such a stupid, uninformative title for a Digg article. I also found it strange because the site it went to was january-1-tcp-ip.blogspot.com. That sure is a specific blog with some specific keywords.

So then I followed the link to the blog and sure enough, it had 1 post about the advent of TCP/IP on January 1st, 1983. What in the world I thought.

Then I realized what was going on here. As most everyone has seen, Google occasionally honors certain people and holidays with a special logo. The special logo today was to honor the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP. With these special logos, they also link to a query and todays query string was "January 1 tcp/ip".

I imagine the search term originally went to something useful and informative but not now. It was Google Spammed thanks to Google themselves. Now that search phrase, and the clicking of the image on the Google home page, goes to a crap page created to exploit the link and make some AdSense cash. I guess Google doesn't mind too much since in the end they are making money off any click on that site too but still, that is disappointing.

Others also tried to take advantage of this. The first page of the Google search results returned things like this:

• www.digg.com/tech_news/January_1_TCP_IP
• byrev.net/2008-01/january-1-tcpip-switchover
• january-1-tcpip.blogspot.com
• january-1-tcp-ip-123.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-is-january-1-tcpip-and-why-it-is.html
• january-1-tcp--ip.blogspot.com

So why oh why Diggers did you digg this link? As of writing this there are 1895 Diggs!! Is there some revenue sharing here? Can I get in on it too?

Oh, and Google, it is 2008 now, update your copyright text! Geez, keep it to 1 screw up a day on the home page please.