fettig.net

A Google Experiment

Posted by Abe on Wednesday, September 1, 2004 @ 12:28 pm

CNET does something interesting with their URLs: they inject story keywords into the URL, and then their web server ignores the keywords in looking up the story. So these URLs all point to the same story:

This is on top of the “news.com.com” thing, which makes me wonder what kind of mad scientist webmaster they have designing their URLs. Anyway,
I assume they’re doing this for Google’s benefit, which got me to thinking – what happens when a URL contains keywords not found in the actual page? So I’m conducting an experiment. Here’s a link to news.com.com, containing a set of keywords that currently returns 0 results from Google:

Blah

I’ll keep an eye on the search results to see what happens.

3 Comments

  1. Follow this url:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.com+rasterweb

    You’ll see phony url’s I made years ago pointing to news.com articles.

    Here’s one of them:

    http://rasterweb.net/raster/199808.html#08181998

    Feel free to pollute/experiment! ;)

    Comment by Pete Prodoehl — September 8, 2004 @ 2:33 pm

  2. Pete – interesting! Seems like that you were able do exactly what I’m trying here. Funny that you used news.com as your guinea pig, too.

    A week after my post, the search still doesn’t return any results. But it may just take a while for new pages to make in into Google’s index.

    Comment by Abe — September 9, 2004 @ 3:36 pm

  3. I used news.com because back in 1998 or so I read an article about how they used these query string on links to determine if people click on the top nav, left nav, from an email, etc, and they would analyze all of the data. So I thought I’d send them a message and see what happened.

    Comment by Pete Prodoehl — September 10, 2004 @ 9:55 am

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