When I search for specific things, I often get sites that appear to be relevant from the summaary. But when I click on them, they wind up be something totally unrelated. How do these sites show up in the intitial search?
For instance, I was just searching for “idiopathic pitting edema”, a fairly specific medical thing. One of the sites I got (using Yahoo) was titles “EDEMA” and at the address: www.anale-sesso.net/edema . The excerpt listed several different types of edema. But when I clicked it, I was redirected to a porn site. Another link directed me to an irrelevent nutritional supplement.
Is this just an older site the porn site has aquired? Or do they have ways of generating random strings for any search term you might use? I can see how the nutritional supplement might want to snag people looking for health items but I don’t see the benefit to the porn site unless it’s just to generate hits.
Sometimes the original site doesn’t renew its address, either because it gives up the site, or it forgets. The “anale” as part of the site name probably made it attractive to a porn site, so it bought the address and used it.
Yes, it increases hits. Plus, it’s the same reasoning as spam: maybe someone somewhere might be interested in the porn site and this gets them to it.
In addition, port sites try to fool Google into linking to them. Sometimes this involves hidden words repeated in order to get the spider to think they are saying a lot about a particular subject. To see if this is the case, look at che cached version of the page. If it’s fooled Google, then the cached version should match the actual page; if it’s a redirect, then you’ll see what you were looking for on the cached version.
So these sites are using a redirect with an older page whose domain they’ve aquired? I also seem to find a lot pages with fairly useless lists that contain a lot of pop-ups and spyware. Have these sites compiled big lists of common medical (and other terms) or do they generate them? I guess what I’m asking is if these pages are pre-existing (i.e. someone has created multiple pages with these terms on them) and residing on a server somewhere. I guess that must be it because there is no way for these sites to “know” what Yahoo or Google is searching for and to create a page during the search. (which is kinda what I was thinking was happening before I thought this through) There are probably programs that make it really easy to automatically create a lot of different pages with different terms to snag the unsuspecting Googler, right?
I have always suspected that Google provides an API to allow respectable web sites to show their wares that may only exist in a database.
For example, if I am looking for a DeWalt rechargable drill, Google will probably show me some links that will bring up dynamic catalog pages from various tool vendors and such. Many of the pages may show all items from the vendor’s catalog that have my search terms. I like this feature.
What makes this more compelling is that I often notice that off-the-wall query strings often show up verbatim in some of the supposed hits:
For example: I google for “chrome plated three prong widgets” and I see all kinds of hits like:
“Get your chrome plated three prong widgets right here”
“Price reduction! Chrome plated three prong widgets on sale”
“See the hottest chrome plated three prong widgets in action”
and so on.
They can only be doing that if Google has some sort of dynamic search mechanism that goes outside of their cache. This would also explain those annoying spammy “link farms” that you mentioned. Ugh.
Yes! That’s exactly what I was trying to ask about. I think some of my searches are way too random to be a page previously generated. But I don’t get how the sites could know Google (or Yahoo, etc.) are doing the searches. Particularly, if what Google is really searching is not the pages in real-time but previously cached versions.
Hopefully, some of the Doper computer gurus will be along to explain this.
Myself, I thought google was always very straight about when it was giving you a link to search for your key phrase somewhere else, as opposed to giving you a hit… “Search for ‘chrome plated three prong widgets’ at findanytool.com” and so on.
But going back to the OP, one other thing that might be relevant is the principle underlying google bombs - google assigns a fairly high score to terms appearing in links to the target page… which aren’t something you can see following the original link. If thousands of people all link to the redheads in bikinis site with “Sales assistance consultation” as the link text, it may well start to show in the google search results (depending on how many other good hits there are for that search term.)
