fau_zar.htm Search Engine pitfalls and how to strike back by Zarathustra

~ Search Engine pitfalls and how to strike back ~
by Zarathustra

Courtesy of [www.searchlores.org] and [www.searchlore.org]

February 2001, part of the [anti-advertisement lab]

Using our knowledge and the depth of the web to fight our commercial enemies
Zarathustra, a friend (at times) of Faulpelz, will show you below a simple yet incredibly effective idea to retaliate against a commercial site that dared annoy you. In fact the proposed solution is of almost perfect elegance:

what are commercial sites based on? Greed.
how do you punish greedy people? You take them their wealth away, until (if ever) they will understand that only knowledge, and not money, has any meaning at all

Of course the process of teaching knowledge to the commercial idiots -incidentally ruining them- may take a long time... this being always the case with all learning processes. Teachers and all kind of other Samaritans, like, us should have a lot of patience (and some good automated scripts). Enjoy! :-)

Search Engine pitfalls and how to strike back
by Zarathustra, February 2001
Slightly edited by fravia+

Whenever you search for something on the net sooner or later you have to check the results. Even if you are an advanced seeker, able to sieve out most traps you cannot avoid all lures that are setup purposely just to push some shrill popups/banners down your eyes.
Of course we use all our filters, proxies, firewall, HOSTS files and all other "magic pouch" tricks up our sleeves to avoid most of this crap, but sometimes this does not work 100% and we still have to look at ugly-colored commercial ads... often enough incredibly silly ("click on the moving monkey to win" "from which country does Scwarzenheidegger come from?" Man! Just their implied weltanschauung insults me a lot!).

Do we really want to live with this? Do we have to? I think NO! I believe that the eyes of a seekers are far too precious juwels and I am convinced they should NOT be sullied by such vulgar crap.

We must and we can strike back... How should we retaliate and punish the offenders?

resubmitting the URL to the Search Engine again and again until the URL is blocked?
reporting the URL as spam/illegal content etc., if the SE is offering such an option?

Well, yes... this may work - sometimes - but not always... and for an accomplished ~Seeker~ it is just not 'elegant' to have to rely on such 'dubious' solutions.

I have devised another 'completely different' approach in order to solve this problem. An approach that has the added advantage of solving in most cases the problem forever.

grab all sponsor-URL's of the site (Attention: NOT ALL banner-URL's on a site are 'sponsor'-URL's!) and copy them into your favourite editor. You will get a list like the following one:

remove all queries and additional paths from the URL's:

Now to the interesting part: visit all listed sponsoring site(s)... Interesting? You don't think so!? Yes, it is... Eheh: read the 'terms' (or however they call those warnings) on the sponsor site(s). Can you already feel what we will do? No!? Go further... READ the terms again and you will find sentences like the following:

   >... will pay you for unique visitors that enter our website(s) 
   >received from a banner(s) served from your website. The amount 
   >you are paid is $1 50 per sign-up. . Tampering will lead to 
   >termination, loss of all funds, and possibly prosecution. ...

   >All clicks you send to us must come from a webpage. We do 
   >not allow email links/spamming or any other such practices 
   >that could reflect negatively on our program. Failure to comply 
   >to this request will result in the immediate cancellation of 
   >the account from which the hits were sent and also may result 
   >in the forfeiture of any funds owed to that account. 
   >SPAMMING IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

   >... In addition to the foregoing,
   >we will immediately terminate your participation in the 
   >Program if we believe you have engaged in any of the 
   >following:
   >- Unsolicited mass e-mail solicitations, IRC postings or 
   >any other form of spamming, including but not limited to, 
   >newsgroups or AOL customers or otherwise violate the 
   >anti-spamming policies of COMPANY or state law;
   >- Attempt to cheat, defraud or mislead us in any way;
   >- Promote passwords, MP3, or Warez;

Now I am sure you can feel it... you already know how we will retaliate :)

simply violate one or two terms where the webmaster looses all his 'hard earned' money (whereby luring zombies should not be classified as hard work, should it?)

You can for instance set up a site (on geocities, ...) and use the webmasters banner-URL's! If it is not allowed to use the same ID on different sites he looses his money, because the sponsors are tracking all visitors, so they will recognize the second site. If it is not allowed to use porn, then place some porn pictures on your site ('nudity' or 'breasts' are in most cases enough...) As most sponsors are paying their webmasters monthly you will have to lean back, wait and check the target-site from time to time! If the webmaster has removed all banners then you won, if he has just changed his sponsor(s) you can restart the game until he gives up.

Since you'r already at it, do a thorough job: use your target's working emails, copy a large amount of his site on your faked copy, so to make it almost impossible for him to claim he "didn't know about that site".

If you don't want to set up a second site, then just use one of the many perl-script that push clickrates. There were a quantity of these scripts to make quick money with the advertisement idiots a couple of years ago, until they developed means of detecting them. But to be detected is exactly what you want in this case!
The script should simply click at the given banner-URL's 100-1000 times via *ROTATING* (and of course semi-anonymous) proxies. The sponsors will detect this type of 'manipulation', but I hope fravia's readers will add to this essay some new easy to use ad hoc perl scripts.

This are just some examples how you can kick in the groin a commercial webmaster you dislike until he's put out of the game. In the best case he is healed forever (he learns the correct path) and in the worst case even better things could happen: since he thinks he his 'innocent' he may post flames about his 'bad experiences' with sponsor-x at some boards/newsgroups moaning that sponsor-x are unreliable, because they did not paid him... and it's highly possible, that this will influence others and damage all of them. How nice! :-)

I think now you understand the game I'm proposing you, so have fun and strike back wherever you feel you have to! Forward ~Seekers~ !

The magic pouch
With our black firewall shields with our glistening browsers swords with our magic pouch full of tricks to cast beware us webmasters out of our way, advertisers bow down in worship very low bow down before our singing hosts and in our holy presence be lost
Ancient seekers' rhyme (+fravia's own collection)

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