MBA E-Commerce: August 2005

Friday, August 19, 2005

Why do people post reviews on Amazon?

Interesting discussion on the Freakonomics blog.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

You did what?! This is unbelievable.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005 · Last updated 3:17 p.m. PT

AOL worker who stole e-mail list sentenced

By LARRY NEUMEISTER
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

NEW YORK -- A 25-year-old former America Online employee who admitted he became a cyberspace "outlaw" when he sold all 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses to spammers was sentenced Wednesday to a year and three months in prison.

"I know I've done something very wrong," the soft-spoken and teary eyed Jason Smathers told U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein as he apologized for a theft that resulted in spammers sending out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mails.

"The Internet is not lawless" was the lesson of the case, said Assistant U.S. Attorney David Siegal.

"The public at large has an interest in making sure people respect the same values that apply in everyday life, on the Internet," Siegal said.

Smathers' lawyer, Jeffrey Hoffman, called the theft a "dumb, stupid, insane act" that his client feels terrible about.

Smathers apologized to a half dozen members of his family who had flown from California and Indiana to attend the sentencing as Hellerstein credited the former Harpers Ferry, W. Va., resident for his contrition and efforts to help the government.

Earlier this year, he had pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in a plea deal which had called for a sentence of at least a year and a half in prison.

In a letter from Smathers to the court that was read partially into the record by Siegal, Smathers tried to explain the crimes that AOL has said cost the company at least $300,000 and possibly millions of dollars.

"Cyberspace is a new and strange place," Siegal said Smathers wrote. "I was good at navigating in that frontier and I became an outlaw."

The judge imposed the reduced sentence of one year and three months, saying he recognized Smathers cooperated fully but lacked information to build other criminal cases.

He said leniency was appropriate for "someone who tries hard to bare his soul but doesn't have the information the government needs."

In December, Hellerstein said he was not convinced Smathers had committed a crime, but he accepted the plea in February when he said prosecutors had sufficiently explained why he had.

Smathers admitted accepting $28,000 from someone who wanted to pitch an offshore gambling site to AOL customers, knowing that the list of screen names might make its way to others who would send e-mail solicitations.

The judge has recommended that Smathers be forced to pay $84,000 in restitution, triple what he earned. He delayed the order to let AOL prove the damages were higher. The judge suggested the $300,000 damage figure was speculative.

Prosecutors said Smathers had engaged in the interstate transportation of stolen property and had violated a new federal CAN-SPAM law, short for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, which is meant to diminish unsolicited e-mail messages about everything from herbal penile enlargement pills to mortgages.

In December, the judge said he had dropped his own AOL membership because he received too much spam.

America Online Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., has since launched a major assault on spam, significantly reducing unsolicited e-mails.

Smathers was fired by AOL in June 2004. Authorities said he used another employee's access code to steal the list of AOL customers in 2003 from its headquarters in Dulles, Va.

Smathers allegedly sold the list to Sean Dunaway, of Las Vegas, who used it to send unwanted gambling advertisements to subscribers of AOL, the world's largest Internet provider. Charges are pending against Dunaway.

The stolen list of 92 million AOL addresses included multiple addresses used by each of AOL's estimated 30 million customers. It is believed to be still circulating among spammers.

The judge refused a Probation Department recommendation that Smathers be banned from his profession as a software engineer, saying he trusted Smathers had learned his lesson.

Monday, August 15, 2005

Firefox' market share slips.

One of the joys of working on a cutting-edge case is that it is constantly-evolving. Today, we learn that Firefox' share slipped and IE picked up 0.6% in July. This Slashdot thread on the topic should give you an idea of where things stand.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Marchex made it to the Washington Post- not sure they wanted to. :-)

Web Increasingly Cluttered By Sites Full of Paid Links

By Leslie Walker
Thursday, August 11, 2005; D01

Search-related advertising is fueling a new wave of Web sites that seem to have as much appeal as a cheesy Hollywood set. That's because many are created to look good to search engines, much as fake scenery fools TV cameras.

Everywhere I turn online these days I stumble over junky sites that do little more than clutter up the search results at Google and Yahoo.

Consider Angry.com, a site displaying paid links to self-help tapes, videos and other "anger management" products on the left, and additional sponsored links to topics having nothing to do with anger on the right. The site is purely an advertising directory, much of it unrelated to what visitors are probably seeking.

The people behind Angry.com and similar sites hope to capitalize on the rise of search advertising as the Web's leading way to make money, a phenomenon that has accelerated since Google and Yahoo found ways to distribute the ads they sell to thousands of other sites around the Web.

Search ads started as simple text links displayed next to regular results when you type a word like "camera" into a search box. Every time viewers click on one of the advertising links, the advertiser pays the search company.

Google and Yahoo have programs that allow those ads to be displayed on other Web sites and share the ad revenue with those site publishers, and Web sites have proliferated to take advantage of that. Some of the sites get you there under false pretenses, suggesting that you'll find articles about cameras but displaying only paid links of marginal relevance.

For example: Cameraz.com, where people wind up when they try to type "cameras.com" into their Web browser address bar but misspell it. Like Angry.com, Cameraz.com is an advertising directory with a list of camera links, and ads for sites unrelated to photography. And when you go to leave, up pops a small box asking if you'd like to reset your home page to another ad directory, at Searching.net.

All three sites are owned by Marchex Inc., a Seattle-based search marketing firm that sold stock to the public last year and is one of many companies trying to ride the boom in search engine advertising, which generated about $4 billion in revenue last year. Marchex picked up those Web addresses and more than 100,000 others last year when it bought Name Development Ltd. for $164 million.

This week, Marchex rolled out more than 50 Web sites based on Zip codes, such as 20010.com for Washington D.C., each featuring local weather, maps and sponsored links to local businesses. It announced plans to generate similar sites for almost all 42,500 Zip codes in the United States.

Great, I thought as I listened to Marchex executives discuss their local-site strategy on a conference call this week. That's just what the Web needs, thousands more destination pages with long lists of paid links.

Marchex contends that its strategy, which relies partly on what it calls "direct navigation," or people typing addresses into their Web browsers, will provide real value to Web surfers because it will gradually add real information to its many sites.

"We are very focused on finding and aggregating names that are generic in nature and fully defensible, and then building those sites into destinations rather than just lists of ads," Marchex president and chief operating officer John Keister said in a phone interview.

The search engine ad industry appears to have touched off a moneymaking frenzy only slightly less intense than the original dot-com boom. But I can't help but think that this new wave is generating too many useless link directories designed to provide no value to site visitors, while making money the same way Google and Yahoo do, by showing links to sites that pay each time someone clicks on them.

Many redistribute text ads sold by Google and Yahoo, which makes the Web feel like a hall of mirrors.

Another Web search firm, Interchange Corp., jumped into the local-content market this week by launching a site for which it paid $700,000 to acquire the domain name -- Local.com. Rather than spawning thousands of distinct sites like Marchex does, Local.com offers a single, Google-like search box inviting people to type in the place and type of goods they are seeking.

Not all sites created to display search ads are content-free, of course. Another search-marketing firm, InfoSearch Media Inc., runs a site with 250,000 articles on various topics (ArticleInsider.com). The articles were written under contract by more than 200 writers and were commissioned specifically to get listed in search engines, according to chief executive Steve Lazuka.

The articles earn revenue by displaying text ads from Google, but, just as important, they showcase the kind of content that InfoSearch Media sells to other sites wanting to boost their rankings in search results at Google and its rivals.

Lazuka's technology allows site publishers to log in and specify what type of content they want online, then receive several pages of copy supposedly written in a style designed to offer the kinds of sentence structures, titles and copy flow that search-engine software looks for and is likely to rank higher in results. It sounds like a content factory, but at least the articles are written by humans. More disturbing is a trend Lazuka said appears to have picked up steam in recent months.

Called "content scraping," it involves software programs that grab snippets of text from a variety of different Web sites and reassemble them into sentences on particular topics to help flesh out garbage Web sites. Since search engines penalize sites that duplicate or steal text from other sites, these programs attempt to fool them by shuffling words as if they were cards.

Lazuka and other site owners said they see more and more sites publishing snippets of their content that appears to be created in this fashion. "These scraper sites are a real problem, and it can wind up penalizing your site if the search engine thinks you are responsible," Lazuka said.

Leslie Walker's e-mail address is walkerl@washpost.com.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Google Delays Book Scanning Project

Google Delays Book Scanning
Copyright Concerns Slow Project

By Yuki Noguchi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 13, 2005; D01

Google Inc. has suspended some of its project to place a vast selection of books online, bowing at least temporarily to concerns of publishers who fear scanning material into the world's most powerful search engine will lead to unauthorized use and duplication of copyrighted material.

Google launched its test service, Google Print, in October and later started its Google Print Library Project, an attempt to scan books in five libraries to make them searchable online. Mountain View, Calif.-based Google postponed further scanning of copyrighted books from libraries at Harvard University, the University of Michigan and Stanford University until November. Until then, copyright holders can opt out of the scanning by contacting Google directly, the company said.

The New York Public Library and Oxford University, which also partnered with Google, have agreed only to share a limited number of materials, including books no longer protected by copyright.

"We think most publishers and authors will choose to participate in the publisher program in order to introduce their work to countless readers around the world," Google Print product manager Adam M. Smith said in a posting on the company's official Web log. "But we know that not everyone agrees, and we want to do our best to respect their views too. So now, any and all copyright holders . . . can tell us which books they'd prefer that we not scan if we find them in a library," Smith wrote in his posting.

Some books are already viewable at other online sites. Web-based retailer Amazon.com, for example, allows prospective buyers to read the first several pages of some books. To put that content online, Amazon negotiates deals with the publisher or author. Google's search service would only allow users to look up several sentences in copyrighted materials, not the entire book.

"What we're doing here is completely in line with the principles of fair use," Smith said in an interview. "We think this will help more users discover their books, and buy their books."

But publishers say Google has pushed the online boundary much further, rewriting copyright law by scanning in books in their entirety and putting the burden of copyright protection on authors and publishing houses to contact Google if they do not want their items searchable online.

"We think they have to stop this entirely," said Patricia S. Schroeder, president and chief executive of the American Association of Publishers, which represents more than 300 publishers. International publishers are equally concerned about having to opt out of having their materials put online, she said. "This idea that the rights holder has all the burden . . . that's crazy," she said, adding that her group has been trying since June to privately negotiate an alternative solution with Google.

Google, which through mapping, video and image products aims to make most of the world searchable online, said it is trying to balance its lofty goals with fairness to the copyright holders.

"The goal of Google Print is ambitious: to make the full text of all the world's books searchable by anyone," Smith said in his posting. "These books are hard to find now, and for most of them, no full-text search exists. We think that making books easier to find will have a positive impact on the world."

That intention is worth pursuing, said David Sohn, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital policy think tank.

"It's an example of how the Internet offers a lot of great new opportunities for disseminating information, and it is important to resolve those [copyright] issues so we really take advantage of those opportunities," Sohn said.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Drivers Check for Lowest Gas Prices on the Web!

At the Pumps and on the Web, Drivers Check for Lowest Prices
By KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER, Aug. 12 - By day, Ken Colaizzi logs a lot of miles for his family's home-improvement business, and as he drives, he likes to note the price of gasoline at local stations.

At night he becomes a kind of Walter Winchell of pump-and-pay, dishing the dirt about whose prices are hot and whose are not, as a volunteer price spotter for denvergasprices.com, a comparative fuel shopping Web site.

"I like to expose the ones who are charging outrageous amounts," Mr. Colaizzi said. "People work hard for their money, and the last thing you want to do is spend an extra 50 cents a gallon that you didn't have to."

For millions of Americans, filling up the tank has become an eye-popping experience this summer as prices reached levels that, after adjusting for inflation, have been seen only once on any sustained basis since World War II - in the late 1970's and early 1980's, when the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war disrupted global oil supplies.

Through last Monday, the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded had risen nearly 26 percent in 12 months, according to the Federal Energy Information Administration, with the sharpest rise - 17 percent in just the last two months.

The price continued to rise this week, reaching $2.41 on Friday, a record, the American Automobile Association's daily survey found.

But as Mr. Colaizzi's adventures in cyberspace illustrate, the United States is in a very different place today from where it was in the late 1970's.

The tools to fight back have changed, for one thing. From the Internet to the alternative fuel choices of ethanol and electricity hybrid technology - and more adventurous forays, like a school district in Georgia that is experimenting with chicken-fat-laced fuel for its bus fleet - options abound.

Countering that development almost completely, energy experts and economists say, is that people drive more than they did a generation ago, with longer commuting trips from sprawling suburbs, and are more likely to be driving big sport utility vehicles or light trucks when they do.

"This gas and vehicle thing is tied up with the entire way we lead our lives now," said Steve Hoch, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. The bigger vehicles that are getting slammed by the surge in gasoline prices, Professor Hoch said, are all part of the supersized demographic shift to bigger everything in the last decade, like the sizes of an average home and of the average big-box discount retail store.

"But just imagine if everybody had to get to Costco in a Prius," Professor Hoch added, referring to the Toyota gas-electric hybrid that gets about 50 miles to the gallon. "How would they bring the 43 rolls of toilet paper home? This shift to higher prices is not going to be easy."

Some pathways to a cheaper tank remain unchanged - as tried and true as the early bird and the worm. Garrie Baldwin, a schoolteacher who lives in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, got up at 4 a.m. on Wednesday to drive 25 miles to Hackensack, N.J., for a gasoline giveaway to the first 100 customers, paid for by a shopping complex in Pennsylvania. He was the first in line.

"Any time you can get some free gas, you've got to take it these days," Mr. Baldwin said.

Mr. Baldwin's fiancée, Andrea Rouse, said she thought the same way. She was third in line.

Jose Blanco, a gasoline station attendant at the Bird Road Chevron in Miami, said many of his customers no longer filled up their tanks, because they could not afford to or they could not bear to watch the numbers turn over.

"They're trying to not spend too much at once, so you see them pumping $5, and two or three days later you'll see the same person pumping another $5," Mr. Blanco said.

Some people are fighting back in more overt ways. Hundreds of truck drivers choked southern Florida highways on Wednesday in a protest convoy in support of price breaks for independent commercial haulers. Reports of gasoline "driveoff" thefts have risen around the country.

But the more common response, expressed in dozens of interviews around the nation this week, owed much more to Rodney Dangerfield - an eye-rolling shrug of what-can-you-do resignation. It was embodied by Tim McNulty, a 54-year-old house painter. Gasoline, Mr. McNulty said, is not optional. It is like tobacco, he added, dragging on a cigarette as he spoke to a reporter at the Kean Oil Company, a station on Chicago's South Side.

"If you have a job and you've got to drive, then you're going to buy the gas," he said.

In Georgia, Terry Simpson, transportation director of the Floyd County School District, said he was testing biodiesel fuel to see whether blends of 5 percent to 20 percent chicken fat were more efficient.

Economists say that prices have been driven up by oldest equation of all - global demand outpacing the supply, compounded by unease in the Middle East and a lack of new refineries for processing oil into gasoline. The contract price of crude oil reached $67.10 a barrel in trading on Friday, a record.

Economists also say the context of the energy surge is crucial to how people are responding. In the 70's, they say, higher gasoline prices were seen by many people as part of a fabric of woes like inflation, high interest rates and cold war tensions with the Soviet Union. In the 40's, with the nation at war, high gasoline prices - not to mention gasoline rationing - were the least of many people's worries.

Today, with low interest rates and easy credit card access, many people can absorb, or at least postpone, the pain without changing their behavior all that much. Surveys by AAA suggest that many summer travelers are doing just that, taking the family vacation no matter what and worrying about the costs later.

"They only have a certain number of paid days off from work, the kids are out of school, and they're just very reluctant to give it up," said Geoff Sundstrom, a spokesman for AAA.

But at least one economist - though there may be others out there hiding under their desks - said he thought that gasoline prices were still not high enough and that Americans in a time of war should be making greater sacrifices for their country through higher gasoline taxes.

"I think it would be a good thing if gasoline prices were twice as high as they are now, though I know that won't make me popular," said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.

Professor Loewenstein said a gradual increase in the gasoline tax, as opposed to market-driven price increases that he said benefited mainly oil producers, would help the federal budget deficit and decrease dependence on foreign oil by encouraging conservation.

At the Pinewood Lodge Campground in Plymouth, Mass., companies that deliver supplies to the campground grocery store and ice cream shop have begun passing along higher fuel costs with surcharges, said the campground owner, Jim Saunders. The good news, he said, is that some campers are staying longer to save money on gasoline themselves.

Bruce Blair, 54, a teacher from Celina, Ohio, who drove 14 hours to the campground with his family to see his son in a marching band competition, canceled plans to drive to Seattle for a week.

"We didn't want to spend $1,000 on gas to get there," Mr. Blair said as he fixed the rearview mirror on his Chevy Astrovan. The family was sleeping in a white pop-up trailer parked behind the car. "It makes you think twice about where you're going."

Some people are seeing opportunities in the price spiral to help others. Members of the Gateway Pentecostal Fellowship in Cranston, R.I., raised $1,000 last month to subsidize the price of gasoline at a service station to help working-class residents. The church's members pumped 2,000 gallons, trimmed by a 50-cent-a-gallon subsidy, down to $1.89.

The Gateway pastor, Russell Farmer explained, "We just wanted to be there as representatives of the Lord and show that he cares about everyday problems."

People who study consumer behavior say the next threshold to watch for in reaction to rising prices is the number "3," as in $3 a gallon.

This week, drivers in San Francisco officially saw a "3." A Chevron station near the Golden Gate Bridge sold regular unleaded for $3.09 a gallon on Thursday morning. At 11 a.m., a clerk strolled over to the price-per-gallon placard and added 6 cents, putting the price at $3.15.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Terry Aguayo in Miami; Janon Fisher in Hackensack, N.J.; Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco; Gretchen Ruethling in Chicago; Chelsea J. Samuel in Atlanta; and Katie Zezima in Plymouth, Mass.

Monday, August 08, 2005

Real-time box office results.

Does your organization have such a reporting sytem?

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Economic Analysis of B2B E-Commerce.

If you are interested in a serious analysis of the value of B2B E-Commerce to a corporation, see this.

Drive-throughs and order size.

...consumers order a smaller size of Coke when passing through the drive-through than when ordering indoors at the counter... Why? Read more here.

When pigs Wi-Fi.

When Pigs Wi-Fi
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: August 7, 2005, NYTimes.com

HERMISTON, Ore.

This is cowboy country, where the rodeo is coming to town, the high school's "kiss the pig" contest involves a genuine hog, and life seems about as high-tech as the local calf-dressing competition, when teams race to wrestle protesting calves into T-shirts.

But Hermiston is actually a global leader of our Internet future. Today, this chunk of arid farm country appears to be the largest Wi-Fi hot spot in the world, with wireless high-speed Internet access available free for some 600 square miles. Most of that is in eastern Oregon, with some just across the border in southern Washington.

Driving along the road here, I used my laptop to get e-mail and download video - and you can do that while cruising at 70 miles per hour, mile after mile after mile, at a transmission speed several times as fast as a T-1 line. (Note: it's preferable to do this with someone else driving.)

This kind of network is the wave of the future, and eastern Oregon shows that it's technically and financially feasible. New York and other leading cities should be embarrassed that Morrow and Umatilla Counties in eastern Oregon are far ahead of them in providing high-speed Internet coverage to residents, schools and law enforcement officers - even though all of Morrow County doesn't even have a single traffic light.

The big cities should take note, said Kim Puzey, the general manager of the Port of Umatilla on the Columbia River here. "We'd like people to say, 'If they can do it out in the boondocks with a small population, that model can be applied to highly complex areas,' " he said.

Mr. Puzey, who says wireless broadband is central to the port's operations, argues persuasively that broadband is just the next step in expanding the national infrastructure, comparable to the transcontinental railroad, the national highway system and rural electrification.

Indeed, we need to envision broadband Internet access as just another utility, like electricity or water. Often the best way to provide that will be to blanket a region with Wi-Fi coverage to create wireless computer networks, rather than running D.S.L., cable or fiber-optic lines to every home.

So if the first step was to get Americans wired, the next step is to make them wireless.

Two pioneers in that process are Portland, Ore., and Philadelphia, which are both moving toward citywide Wi-Fi Internet access. Consumers will still have to pay for broadband, but only about half as much as they do now.

Still, Portland and Philadelphia won't have their systems in place until next year. Meanwhile, the system in eastern Oregon covers a larger geographic area, is free for consumers and has been up and running for more than a year and a half.

One reason it sprang up here is that a nearby Army depot contains chemical weapons, so there is special concern about what would happen if a cloud of nerve gas escaped from the depot. That fear helped provide a pot of federal money to underwrite safety systems.

Usually, the police and fire agencies communicate just by radio, but Hermiston decided to go with a public-private partnership that established a Wi-Fi network. The police chief, Dan Coulombe, showed me the wireless computers that all police officers now carry. They can download data and receive images from video monitors - and, if nerve gas ever escaped, display the cloud's direction and speed.

Fingerprint readers are now being added to these portable devices so a police officer can almost instantly run a person's fingerprint through a multistate database. And if there's a report of a burglary, the police rushing to the scene can download floor plans of the building, live images from video monitors and information about the alarm system.

The wizard behind the system is Fred Ziari, an Iranian immigrant and Wi-Fi pioneer who runs a high-tech company in Hermiston and Portland, EZ Wireless. Mr. Ziari contracted with the local authorities to provide the Wi-Fi service, which lets consumers piggyback for nothing.

Hermiston is already starting to introduce WiMax, the next generation of technology after Wi-Fi, offering much higher speeds and greater range.

Other American towns need to follow Hermiston, not necessarily in holding "kiss the pig" contests, but in ensuring broadband Internet access as reliably as they do water or electricity. The fact is, unless you're a cowboy here in eastern Oregon, you're behind the times.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

The New York Times has a special section on "the digital student" today.

The lead article starts this way...

AT a June orientation briefing for parents at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, talk turned quickly to technology. Five students had given up their Sunday afternoon to address issues that the fretful parents might have had about sending their children to college - finding a balance between study and fun, Greek life, campus safety, binge drinking. But many parents had other questions: which operating system is best; is a laptop or desktop preferable; how good is the wireless access; and is it necessary to bring a printer?

The session's leader, a little desperate, finally asked, "Does anyone have questions that aren't about technology?"

The other stories in the special section include-

Tough Course: The Calculus of Cellphones
If your young collegian doesn't yet have a cellphone, or is interested in switching plans or carriers, rejoice; the cellular shopping game has recently become much more interesting.

The Gadgets They've Got, and Why They Got Them
By LAURA RANDALL
Five students talk about the gear they're bringing to the dorm and why they chose it.

New Tools: Blogs, Podcasts and Virtual Classrooms
By ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL
Podcasts, blogs and virtual-reality sites are creating entirely new ways to teach.
• If You Virtually Build It, They Will Virtually Check It Out

Laptops and Desktops: Basics, Bells and Whistles
By WILSON ROTHMAN
Fortunately, the major computer vendors are hungry for your business. These days, if you know what you want in a computer system - and don't become distracted by the hot rods - you can strike bargains.

From Virtual Keyboards to Hidden Storage, Little Extras That Help From Virtual Keyboards to Hidden Storage, Little Extras That Help
By ERIC A. TAUB
Believe it or not, some high-tech accessories can actually improve the educational experience. Here is a shortlist of some of the newest accessories that could pique a student's interest.

Where's Johnny? Smart Cards and Satellites Help Keep Track
By LISA GUERNSEY
Schools are upgrading video cameras in and around school buildings (and sometimes in buses) to enable real-time monitoring in remote offices.
• Software That Lets Teachers Take a Peek

From Early On, Multimedia Rules

Digital Alarm Clocks That Do Everything but Dump Water on Your Head

If You Virtually Build It, They Will Virtually Check It Out

The Link That Can Help Make Macs Cheaper

In Small Rooms, Fitting Many Functions: Tech Built for the Dorm

Software That Lets Teachers Take a Peek

Monday, August 01, 2005

Companies subvert search results to squelch criticism

This ties in well with what we talked about on Wednesday-

"It's not illegal, but it's SEO gone bad. Companies such as Quixtar are using Google-bombing, link farms and Web spam pages to place positive sites in the top search results -- which pushes the negative ones down."

Here's the story.

MBA E-Commerce