From The Southern Weekend (in Chinese), translated by EastSouthWestNorth:
There is a vast amount of economic interests behind the search engines, since being found by a search engine is an important method of increasing the number of hits to a website. Search engines are also important indicators in the “economy of attention” on the Internet. The conflict between the search engines and the spammers is not just a technical battle because it is actually a serious problem about product valuations.
You go to Google and you enter “Elder Sister Hibiscus” (ËäôËìâÂßêÂßê). You select one of the top ranked pages for “Elder Sister Hibiscus” and then one of two things will happen. First, within seconds, there would pop out a page such as “Asia’s largest online broadband movie site.” Second, there is a page with many listings of “Elder Sister Hibiscus.” You select one of them and it could be page just like the first kind — the content is totally unrelated to “Elder Sister Hibiscus” and all you see are semi-nude women or naked female breasts.
That was a sampler of what the spammers have done.
Without exception, whenever a term becomes ‘hot’ on the Internet, it will be used by the spammers to cheat the search engines. Right now, it is the moment for “Elder Sister Hibiscus.”
In the realm of the Internet search engines, spammers have become a deluge.
According to a Google search on July 12, there are 1,030,000 pages related to the keyword “Elder Sister Hibiscus.” Of the top 40 pages, 15 (or 37.5%) were actually about her and 25 (or 62.5%) were unrelated to her.
The top ranked page is Sina.com. The second-ranked page Mblogger and the third-ranked page dyo.zj.com are unkonwns. Of the top 10 ranked pages, apart from Sina.com, all the others are blogs that came through BSPs (Blog Service Providers). When these pages are examined, there are plenty of links that say “Elder Sister Hibiscus” but they turn out to lead to sexy movie downloads or mobile telephone ring tone downloads.
