Low Intensity Cyber Wars against Google
One of the things that must worry ordinary users of the Internet is how some cyber attacks can be going on without us even realising it. I stumbled across one a few weeks ago which is affecting all of us who use Google for the accurate and relevant search results.
The discovery was quite by accident. My son Phillip (who is an incredibly talented software engineer) came home for a few days in the summer and took me to task for my previous Web site looking so dated. Overnight he had knocked up the current site from WordPress templates. Towards the end he asked if I wanted a place where readers could leave their comments on my blogs. Getting some informed feedback from others sharing my interests looked interesting.
Within a matter of a day or two of the new site going live, I had my first comment. What a thrill. Not only somebody reading my blog but motivated to comment. Even more exciting was the comment that he would be getting his wife to read it. Now there is an achievement… getting a whole family involved. His comment contained a Web site address… so I checked up on who my first reader was…a roofing company in Philadelphia?
I e-mailed my son who brought me down to earth. He said it was probably Spam mail and I had to be careful since there were now companies with on-line computers that generated pre-written bland comments in blogs for the sole purpose of getting better ranking from the Google search engine- something to do with the number of back links a Web site has.
The next comment confirmed my son’s suspicion. The reader informed me that and I quote “This is positively one of the most remarkable blogs I’ve seen. It’s so easy to tune out, but there is seriously some first-rate material online, and I believe your place is one of the few!” Very flattering were it not from a site selling replica handbags.
The comments then flooded in, with 183 at the last count. Around a quarter were very beguiling. Here is a sample of some of the better one:
…I want to thank you for your efforts that you have made in writing up this blog post…your creative writing abilities has inspired me to start my own personal blog…from a company selling movies on line
…that was a great read. Finally, somebody who actually thinks and understands what they’re writing about. Incredibly uncommon lately, particularly online… Appreciate it, keep it up!…from a company selling calculators
…Lots of extremely interesting reading here, thank you! …from a company selling pregnancy services
…Reading this publication I have stumbled upon answers for plenty questions that have been bugging me for some time now…from a Polish company selling who knows what
Then one that caught my attention by asking a question:
…I am extremely impressed with your writing skills and also with the layout on your blog. Is this a paid theme or did you customize it yourself? Either way keep up the nice quality writing, it’s rare to see a nice blog like this one these days.
I followed up who the writer was and this laid bare one of the (many) master minds behind this activity to influence the search engines. It was a company selling bundles of back-links ranging from $19 for 3000 standard back-links to $999 for 40,000 high PR back links, (whatever they are).
Now there is nothing illegal about this activity and there is a positive aspect to entrepreneurial companies exploiting opportunities. No doubt the service is worth every cent for companies trying to gain visibility amongst what must now be zillions of tiny on-line companies.
But does all this come entirely cost free for the rest of us? For the bloggers it has effectively shut down our chance of dialogue from all parts of the world from people we have never met but who share a common interest, Even more damaging is the blunting of one of the most profound weapons in dealing with the information explosion – the Google (and other) search engines. I have been using Google for the past decade for my research and noticed with the passage of time the increasing amount of irrelevant junk that the Google search results contain. In one particular study I was doing recently I had to reach page 20 of the Google search results to find something I knew that was out there. I wonder how much of this is the result of the highly organised efforts “to game” the search engines?
No doubt the back-room boffins in Google are dreaming up the defensive counter-attack in this low intensity cyber war…but I can’t help feeling that the rest of us need to make clear which side we are on.
For me the search engine ranks with the great public libraries in the passage of human achievement, Google one of the great public benefactors and razor sharp search engines vital to the future of sharing knowledge.
It is actually worse than you think for maintaining a blog. An estimated 90%-95% of all email traffic is spam, and this reflects the percentage of comments posted as spam too. On my online magazine it is running at 99% due to a major magazine linking to me and raising its value. However, the detrimental impact is less on email than a collaborative environment that people expect to be near real-time.
You can either vet posts before they go online, or allow people to publish freely. If you do the former, then you will kill conversations unless you are prepared to monitor them real-time. If the latter then your page will fill with spam and then the search engines will actually penalise *you* as a spammer.
Initially online forums tried to defeat this by making you type letters printed in a distorted font embedded in an image, however this has been comprehensively broken by spammers. There are now commercial anti-comment-spam services much as there are for email, such as Akismet, and these are improving. They are still treating the symptoms and not the underlying problem.
Another system is everybody being able to vote on a post, which in theory means the best posts should float to the top and those below a certain threshhold can be cut off as spam. However history has shown this can be gamed far too easily also.
Going back to Google, they are doing an excellent job of sifting through the web. It will not be long until 99% of all online content is auto-generated spam and link farms but Google will continue to be the best of the bunch until the web splinters into “walled gardens”. Interestingly, their best weapon is still the “Page Rank” algorithm they published whilst the founders were still at University. This means a page will come higher if an ‘important’ site like the BBC links to it rather than an unknown site.
In the mean time, Google fiddles with the rules to throw those trying to game the system. The latter even have the cheek to threaten Google with legal action, when their carefully crafted link-farm drops off the front pages, for “lost business”.
At the end of the day, do people actually care? If people decided to only accept PGP signed emails, this would substantially cut down spam. A PGP key is computationally expensive to generate, and an ISP would only have to blacklist that one key rather than the 1,000,000 individual emails sent. Encryption would make spam even more computationally expensive, and would have the side-effect of preventing identity theft whilst working on the road (eg checking your email from a cafe). Yet despite it being only a few mouse clicks virtually nobody can be bothered to do it.
Google may be one of the great public benefactors, but they can’t really expect much help from the great public.
Phillip.