Sellouts
I was browsing some Mozilla developer blogs, and an entry by Blake Ross on The Daily Stanford and its link spam caught my eye. In a nutshell, The Daily Stanford was (and still is) helping search-engine spammers game google by advertising crap such as diet pills and online degrees. They also advertise online casinos with this amusing quote, “Stanford plays slot machines and blackjack daily at established online casinos where black jack and slots are safe and rewarding.” (originally references www.allslots.com). A later post from Blake shows that the Daily Californian is playing the same game, though a bit less deceptively.
So this got my curiousity going a bit, and I decided to go check out The Daily Bruin. I expected nothing in the way of integrity from them — especially after they used one of my Natcar pictures last year and attributed it to “Daily Bruin Staff” (grrr) — and lo and behold they have the dirt on the bottom of the front page. No plugs for poker, but plenty for (probably fake) “Online College Degrees” and a funky one advertising a “Love Spell” (http://www.egyptian-witchcraft.com/).
With all this kind of shit happenning, no wonder why searching gets harder by the day.