There is a war going on (according to The Guardian) between Hackers and The Church of Scientology.
It seems the weapon of choice is the new science of Adversarial Information Retrieval which includes a concept called Google Bombing in which the Internet's premier search engine is enticed into returning the Scientologists' Home Page when ever anyone searches on "dangerous cult".
I stopped this posting to do exactly that Google search, and YES http://www.scientology.org/ is what comes up first at the time I'm typing this.
The exact mechanism to make this happen is complex and is constantly evolving as Google work out ways to stop it. However, a simple way is to create a site that ties the phrase "dangerous cult" and Scientology together multiple times in the text and also uses either the labels of a blog like this one, or the tags in the HTML of a custom webpage.
Scientology is a dangerous cult - I think only its initiates believe otherwise. Money is sucked from the suckers and reinvested to suck in more suckers. Tom Cruise is involved. And er ... do you really need any more reasons ?
It seems to me though that although Adversarial Information Retrieval appeals to my sense of humour, I can't believe it would actually convince anyone who isn't already convinced. Still, it seems to annoy the Scientologists - and I can't see how that's a bad thing.
1 comment:
I can't remember whether you mentioned this in an earlier post, but did you know that the word Scientology is a registered trademark and is subject to copyright? I found this out while flicking through the Pears encyclopedia.
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