Sex & the Search Engine

[Mark Ellis]

I was puzzled by this too.

>At 10:05 AM 1/23/98 -0800, Alis Whitt wrote:
>..
>>I tried the search you described below.  I can't even locate "superbowl"
>>in the HTML code of some of these sites.  The third "relevant" site in
>>AltaVista (free nude celebs at http://onewebstreet.com/total/index.html)
>>does not have "superbowl" in the code -- anywhere. Up to now, I've at
>>least been able to provide users with a logical explanation for why they
>>get sex when they ask for superbowl (meta tags, white words on a white
>>background, etc.).  What's up here?
>

Then Nick Arnett replied (in part):

>You may be looking at a version that's been edited since it was indexed.
>

Which made me think:

It's quite possible that the porn site is serving up two completely
different pages depending on the requester's IP address.  If the source
address matches one those on a list of search engines, it returns a page
containing the most frequently used keywords. (ie. superbowl, etc.)  For
any other address, it returns a page pushing the real product without any
of the keywords used to spoof the search engine.

This strategy would defeat attempts by search engines to demote pages
containing text of the same color as the background.

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Mark Ellis
Network Support Analyst                 Phone: (604) 231-6410
Richmond Public Library                 Email: mark.ellis at rpl.richmond.bc.ca
Richmond, British Columbia
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