scamizdat@linkline.com (Not Grady Ward) wrote in message news:<3e530804@news2.lightlink.com>...

> Xenu allowed desertphile@RE-MOVEhotmail.com (Shy David) to write:
>
> >Do a search for the phrase "groups I support."

> >Google reports "about 68,200" results, shows three of them, and then
> >states....
>
> >"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some
> >entries very similar to the 3 already displayed."

> >ROTFL!!!
>
> Jesus and Xenu. Go write to Wired Magazine and have them do a story.
>

I agree.

This is a brilliant insight to Google as well as the CoS's pathetic afforts to influence Google.

Seeing as how corporate and governmental efforts to control the Net are all the rage at the moment, it might be expedient to raise this historical issue once again in the light current events.

Can you imagine what's being discussed in Washington at the moment?

Seeing as how the monster anti-war demonstrations were, for the most part, organised over the internet.

Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 15:38:38 -0500
From: tikk <trash@tikk.net>
Subject: Re: A huge Google laugh!
In-Reply-To: <80ee9418.0302190753.6a1577e9@posting.google.com>

Message-ID: <3e53eb51$1@news2.lightlink.com>

This isn't an example of an effort by Scientology to influence Google.

The OurSites pages go back to 1998, just around when Google was finding its footing. The OurSites pages were part of an overall strategy to counter ARS, and further, the internet. It's highly doubtful they were even aware of Google in 1998. But the gist is correct though - they wanted to "flood the net with theta".

There are a few interesting inferences to draw however - one being the obvious; that Scientology created these pages on their own, petitioning the participating Scientologists to fill out a form and sign a release (if that). There have been many OurSites name misspellings caught in the past, indicating a liklihood that the sites weren't even created on the fly by members filling out online form fields, but rather staff members' sloppiness during the data entry process - committing typos from returned paper copies of mailings sent out.

Another easy observation to make is that the program was/is a titanic failure.

The 65,000 Google returns only represent 6,500 members (each person represented in Google accounts for an avg of 10 actual hits, when you add up the pages), even though there are just under 15,000 actual such OurSites sites (Although Scn claims 16,000). After testing a few theories, I think I (with some elf-help) disovered why - sloppiness by whoever created the webpages at http://on-line.scientology.org, which is where it would seem Google is indexing from.

You'll notice the letters A-Z at the bottom of the page - clicking on the letter 'P' brings you to an alphabetized page with persons whose last names begin with 'P'. But notice the file name:

http://on-line.scientology.org/all/PPd.htm

.. and then notice that the P's only go up to PA* .. no Pe*, Pi*, Po*, etc. That's because there were too many P's to fit on one page, so a second page was either made or supposed to be made and wasn't. The naming scheme is inconsistent, and I only took a few unfruitful guesses, so I don't know whether or not a second P page was actually created or whether some staff member just said 'fuck it - that's enough names.' I believe the problem could have been a form over function decision - when it was discovered that a second 'P' directory would be needed, someone nixed the idea because they thought it would look ugly, breaking up the nice symmetry of ... L M N O P-a P-h .. etc. Whatever the case may be, they hurt themselves by not doing the job correctly. You can still get to some of the later P names by going through the geographic directory, but I believe they still wound up hurting themselves for the reason I point to above. Phonkeo Philavanh, for instance, (http://www.oursites.org/phonkeophilavanh/) get missed by Google.

It's probably a combination of a few other factors as well.

Regardless, Google is onto Scientology, and if Scn decides to correct the mistake, it won't help them. It might wind up getting a few people yelled at and causing some monkey work that should've been done correctly the first time, especially since it went unnoticed and had to be pointed out by an SP.

As for the project itself, Charlotte Kates goes into heavy detail here, recalling her time in Scientology when she helped with the OurSites effort. It's a very worthwhile read.

from:

http://offlines.org/org.html

[...]

As a result, I became the local I/C for Scientologists On-Line. I attempted to seek out on-line publics, writing letters out and encouraging them to take the CD kits. I think that other Scientologist was correct when he said merely stating "We want to flood the net with theta" would have been more effective than the FSMing line--many publics were ambivalent about becoming FSMs, and when it was explained that one of the main points of the program was to overpower entheta on the Internet with Scientologist web pages, it often made for an easier time of it! Often the problem simply consisted of getting the publics to actually take the time to make their web pages, and get in their assorted legal and FSM agreements. At the time, the campaign was promoted but not very intensively; it was later that most non-online publics became the "10,000 Scientologists On-Line" when it was discovered that there were, quite simply, not enough Scientologists with Internet connections to make the project appear more than a joke.

[...]

~ tikk

> Seeing as how corporate and governmental efforts to control the Net
> are all the rage at the moment, it might be expedient to raise this
> historical issue once again in the light current events.
>
> Can you imagine what's being discussed in Washington at the moment?
> Seeing as how the monster anti-war demonstrations were, for the most
> part, organised over the internet.

Subject: Re: A huge Google laugh!
From: "kady@wwwaif.net" <kady@wwwaif.net>
Message-ID: <Xns9327A666FD20Fkadywwwaifnet@205.232.34.12>
Date: 19 Feb 2003 16:22:02 -0500

Actually, what's even more interesting is to look at the order of the "Groups" pages, as they appear on Google when you choose to include the deleted results. If you squint, you can almost reverse engineer the ranking process.

(Apologies for long and involved pastings ahead.)

Here's the first page of hits for "Groups I Support":

Scientology - Groups I Support - Bob Ware a Scientologist - find ...

Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of. ...

www.oursites.org/bobware/groups.htm - 6k - 18 Feb 2003 - Cached - Similar pages

Scientology - Groups I Support - Niesha Renee' Trout a ...

Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of. ...

myreligion.scientologist.net/ nieshareneetrout/groups.htm - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Some Groups I Support Groups I Support. Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of.

...

www.scientology-lies.com/groups.html - 10k - Cached - Similar pages

Groups I Support - Scientology - Craig Jensen a Scientologist - ...

Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of. WISE. ...

home.scientologist.org/cjensen/groups.htm - 7k - 18 Feb 2003 - Cached - Similar pages

Scientology - Groups I Support - Dan Trammell a Scientologist - ...

Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of. ...

www.geocities.com/Baja/Canyon/5268/groups.htm - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Scientology - Groups I Support - Tony Lonstein a Scientologist - ...

Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of. ...

tonylonstein.oursites.org/groups.htm - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Groups I Support - Scientology - What Scientologist Charles Thorn ...

Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of. ...

www.bee.net/cthorn/groups.htm - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Scientology - Groups I Support - What Scientologist Matt Feshbach ...

Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of. ...

home1.gte.net/mf/groups.htm - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Scientology - Groups I Support - What Scientologist Brenda J. ...

Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of. ...

members.aol.com/bmac393/groups.htm - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Groups I Support - Scientology and what I, Scientologist David L ...

Click on the links below to visit the home pages of various groups I support for their humanitarian efforts or groups I am a member of. ...

webusers.anet-stl.com/~rozeboom/groups.htm - 8k - Cached - Similar pages

-----

Okay, first of all, why does Bob Ware get to be #1? Well, if you poke around a bit, you will discover that ole Bob is, in fact, the creator of the OneLook.com dictionary, a popular - and undoubtedly highly Googleranked - site. Bob links to his OnlineScn page from his OneLook circa vita, which probably explains its high ranking.

Our next lucky winner in the GoogleRank sweepstakes is Niesha Renee Trout, who attentive ars readers will recall once cited the influence of her "uncle Reed Slatkin" on her OS page. That got her a link from slatkinfraud.com, and that most likely explains her enviable second place ranking.

Okay, on to our third - why, that's not a Scientologist all! That's the one and only Valerie, and her parody page.

Let's see who makes it to #4 - Craig Jensen! Scientologist, software maven, and dare I say it, the not entirely voluntary recipient of a number of links from anti-scn sites such as Tilman and others that deal with Scn influence in software companies. I suspect that would explain his lofty position in the Scn ranking stats.

Now we get into an interesting little battle of ranking factors. The #5 Groups page is Dan Trammell - an unremarkable character, and not one whose name has come up in critical pages enough for that to explain his high placement on this list. But - look at the URL. Dan has *his* OS pag on geocities, not on one of the scientology.org tentacle sites. I would put money on the fact that non-scn-owned-domain pages are ranked higher than those on the machines dedicated to hosting the spam pages.

Back to the list - and here we have Tony Lonstein, also a well-known name for Scn researchers, and one who has also been linked from a number of sites, including slatkinfraud.com and digl-watch.com, amongst others.

From #7-10, the list is taken up with the few remaining offsite OS pages.

If you carry on to the second page of hits, you will see the same phenomenon take place: the Groups pages so honoured by being in the second tier of rankings are evenly split between those hosted offsite (1,2,3 and 4) and those of somewhat more well-known onsite Scientologist webpages, like Jack Dirmann, Andy Bagley and David Amrein (alleged Slatkin co- conspirator, crazy letter-writer and Hulda Clark minion, respectively).

It's really very cool, and a great way to get some insight into how Google goes about the delicate task of ranking 11,000 or so identical sites. As always, being Google, it does so in the most efficient, informative and enlightening way possible.

K

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