June 16, 2005

The Enternet - all babble, all the time

I was doing a search at Technorati and came across a link that seemed promising. Clicked on the link, and thought, cool, a paragraph written about what I was looking for. But then I started reading the paragraph and realized I'd been had.

Whether special stop never might outside whether second whether borders harry potter party, used without bottom can't food dog down meeting onlinne. Without enough living below same dark start girl more borders harry potter party, whole its paper without do space coming man done. Change learned was Indians quickly given among big move borders harry potter party, sites change hour knew intternet learned able across mind. Play quick came would began along play following from, lines no living for girl see fellow space enternet. Use but onnline using oline looked using about life, need use net money blue great meeting girls another. Were after game done like money by hundred also, America from were be near makes start play usually. First above second every net hundred kinds first while, looking now every way night little enternet strong just. Then cold down open also then used before example, an complete intternet over whether between still mind name.

The word that stood out amidst all this randomness was enternet. So I did a search for "enternet" on Technorati. Hmm. Sure seem to be an awful lot of randomly-generated bot-blogs indexed at Technorati.

How many of the 10 million blogs are bogus, I wonder? 10,400+ postings indexed at Technorati contain "enternet". I suspect 99% are bot-generated random link farms. What other "enternet"-type giveaway words are there out there?

Posted by brian at June 16, 2005 08:49 AM

Comments

You get 395,000 entries with "enternet" on Google, with a fair number of bonafide sites...many of them are in languages other than English...

interesting post...thanks.

Posted by: Michael Parekh at June 17, 2005 02:43 PM

Yep. I see this all the time and i think it is one of the major problems with auto-indexing anything.

One of the first blogs i saw on the front page of technorati the other day was "Nothing interesting today fokls, maybe something tomorrow". Now technorati is very cool, but it has made me think.

It is the main reason i created http://taghop.com - the idea being that people can add, rate and comment the best information so you can actually get things that are interesting and relavent. I had some automation in an early alpha but it became obvoius what the problems would be.

Who knows how my site will go, but something like it is absolutely necessary.

steven
http://taghop.com in beta

Posted by: Steven Livingstone at June 18, 2005 03:56 AM

This can be a huge problem on anything shopping-related. In Slashdot terms, it seems like the filter is currently set to -1. Or maybe it is 0, we do not know if or what they are filtering. In any event, certain keywords require the ability to toggle a filter to a higher level.

Posted by: Sean at June 18, 2005 06:23 AM

Taghop looks promising. Tag couds tend to make me a bit dizzy tho. Would be great to see an RSS feed for the "What they are saying" section. Good luck with your project!

Regarding Technocrati, I'm new to it and I find it a bit overwhelming. In the end I find it easier to have a few weblogs bookmarked and then just look at their blogrolls. Once you have found one site that is to your taste, it's easy to find links to other sites you might like that way. And yes... Like Michael Parekh says... there is always Google. Advanced search lets you narrow your results to one language if you so wish.

Posted by: Tore at June 18, 2005 06:59 AM

"onnline" from the same post gives nearly the same result. 10k+ sites. Good one.

Posted by: jm at June 18, 2005 08:25 AM

Brian is right: Market Sentinel have recently been doing some research looking at up-market eco-friendly cosmetic companies Lush, Urban Decay and Body Shop to see who did best in blog commentary. We were confronted by quantities of fake blogs claiming to be written by consumers who used these cosmetics and just wanted to pass the word on. Fake blogs and real blogs were about 50/50 I would estimate. These kinds of activities are very dangerous to the brands concerned, which have made a big investment in their credibility. BTW The research should go out later in the week and we will link to it on our blog.

Posted by: Mark Rogers at June 21, 2005 06:29 AM

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