A bunch of people have decided to spoof search engines. This is nothing new — it is a long, if universally condemned, tradition to try to draw people to your (commercial) site by throwing as much attractive chaff — including the names of competitors — into your META lines as possible.
But these folks are after something different, from what I can tell through their blogs.
Either they are doing it in a jolly, silly desire for hits.
Or they are doing it to basically make searches for some subjects virtually unusable.
The most common form of this new effort is some sort of stream-of-consciousness story that ties in all of these searchable words and phrases. These might be famous movie stars, folks who are common searches for unclothed downloads, famous TV commercial personalities of either the talk show or infomercial kind, the names of popular TV shows, or the sorts of tag lines that are usually found only in the blacklist of applications like PopUp Killer.
You’ll notice I’m not quoting here.
Now, don’t get me wrong. These are often amusing.
And obviously I don’t have any problems with folks trying to get hits for their page. Legitimately.
Call me a stick-in-the-mud. Call me a curmudgeon. Call me a History Major. I just don’t like flooding signal with noise, at least not for fun, and even not usually for malice. The Truth Will Make You Free. Diddling with search engines just strikes me too much like tearing pages out of books in the library. Or rearranging the books. Or rearranging the card catalog.
Maybe there’s not a good reason for people to be seaching for some late-night-TV psychic. But I don’t feel qualified to make that judgment for others.
That sounds really goofy. Maybe it is just that I’m a stick-in-the-mood.
(That’s what I actually wrote. Should be -mud, of course. But maybe that’s a better choice of words.)