Tuesday, December 02, 2008

snooping

over a couple of months something struck me.

it is common knowledge that the google search results were populated based on some ranking alogirthm. hence i wondered if it is possible to poison those results such that your websites get populated first. obviously if you had some relavent content, over a period of time it will be somewhere in the top list. but i didnt have any relavent content interesting to the masses out there. (Note: BTW i am not doing something new, look up search engine poisoning, only that i didnt refer to any of the material online to do what i did).

then i reasoned, what would be the most popular search queries in google? the first thing that struck me was movies. mp3s, clips. basically any media that can be mooched for free (bunch of deadbeats!). and i did know that sites such as rapidshare , megaupload etc hosted such media. if one is adequately familiar with the naming conventions of movies, they usually are titled with divx, xvid, rmvb etc.

so here is what i did: i created a post with the following text:

rapidshare
megaupload

rmvb
divx
xvid
700mbs

thats about it. and i published it. and viola! within about a week or less i began receiving hits from people who were searching these terms. in good amounts as well! and more the number of hits, the Page Ranking algorithm gets duped. even the above text will cause numerous hits.

now if i were a virii author ( I AM NOT, SO GET OF MY BACK!), just hypothetically, that would mean that with some amount of social engineering, i could have links to text in the post pointing to some viruses and the rest of the story is all too familiar these days.

well thats about from me,

cheers,



p.s.: this was done purely with the motive of research and with no other intentions!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, the page rank algorithm is pretty robust (only incoming links and their quality affects the ranking of ur page).... the ranking of such a page, I'm pretty sure must be waay waay low.... the fact u had so many hits shows the amount of desparate loosers out there, or I'm guessing bots/crawlers out there....

kyos said...

i am pretty sure, the algo is pretty robust. but the fact that everyday i get a couple of hits, i guess, help my page being listed in the results..

you can click on the site counter and check the referrers.

most of them are louis and the nazis or something i believe....


one other thing that i noticed was, i created a new blog for my friend, experimenting with the same idea. but he didnt have as much success.

so i guess the time since the whole "site" was up also seems to be a factor for credibility or something.

Blogger Bhaiyya said...

I have a post that has the words "sexy kajol" (no it is not an erotic story)..
i get most of the hits from google on this post :)