Comments on: Google News Credibility Foiled By 15-Year Old

By: SEglington

SEglington — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:47:00 +0000

This reminds me of when someone posted a fake press release pretending to be emulex to drive up a stock price.

I have also seen variations of this practice, one good recent example is one I ran across earlier this month.

A company called Kelly Media Group posted an article on their website saying their president Jason Cardiff was being honored by a watchdog group called DRAWDA (Direct Response Watchdog groups of America) here is the url, I have no idea what it's about the site isnt finished which made me want to see who owns it.

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:hBKBvfN58nMJ:www.kellymediagroup.com/News/News_DRAWDA/news_drawda.html+%22jason+cardiff%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Now if you goto the link on that page http://directresponsewatchdogsofamerica.com/ the cached version is here http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:7BSYuSuLHOsJ:directresponsewatchdogsofamerica.com/+DRAWDA&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us&client=firefox-a

It is of course DRAWDA, but who owns the domain?

Suprise http://who.godaddy.com/WhoIs.aspx?domain=directresponsewatchdogsofamerica.com&prog_id=godaddy

So there is press release fraud or misleadings all over the place, its hardly a new concept, and I dotn think its googles fault for indexing it, its just a search engine.

Over here in England this is highly fraudulent.

Registrant:
Kelly Media Group

2022 W 11th St
Upland, California 91786
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: DIRECTRESPONSEWATCHDOGSOFAMERICA.COM
Created on: 27-Aug-08
Expires on: 27-Aug-09
Last Updated on: 27-Aug-08

Administrative Contact:
Cardiff, Jason jasonj@kellymediagroup.com
Kelly Media Group
2022 W 11th St
Upland, California 91786
United States
(877) 788-8463

Technical Contact:
Cardiff, Jason jasonj@kellymediagroup.com
Kelly Media Group
2022 W 11th St
Upland, California 91786
United States
(877) 788-8463

Domain servers in listed order:
NS25.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS26.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

Registry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Status: clientRenewProhibited
Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:56:00 +0000

This whole thing seems fake. The kids name is Vendetta and the kids article and the writers seem to have about the same amount of mistakes…
Lame.
On the off chance that it is real; congrats kid. I’m sure that was fun when you went to school the next day.

By: Casino

Casino — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:19:00 +0000

It would be a shame if Google removed free PR suppliers from their news feed as a lot of start up companies use this service to get their message out to the world.

Maybe they should verify releases in some way but that is very timely and not to mention costly.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:23:00 +0000

A part from i-newswire do you know another free PR company?

By: j p maher

j p maher — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 01:10:00 +0000

Google has its uses but, but
some Chomskyoid has decreed that "function words", such as "of, the" etc. are to be dropped: What if I am interested in "the use of 'of','the' and 'in'" in English"?

2)Machine "translation" is the best source of yucks on the net:

E.g. in German "der Rock" means 'skirt': Google's "MT" into English of a German-language notice about a "Rock Concert" was transGooglified into "Skirt Concert".

A German-language document "translated as "have loaded tractor-trailers in Sarajevo" from German "bin Laden hat Anhanger in Sarajevo -- bin Laden has on-hangers in Sarajevo".

Google sucks.

By: classifieds

classifieds — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 09:14:00 +0000

haha wow. That was nice of Google to take the prank like that. It was a mistake. I’m sure it helped make the kid money some how.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:54:00 +0000

Why should Google be held more responsible for news, that has no basis in fact, than any other news agency? A major news network recently distributed a story about linux distribution rights being revoked from Novell for a joint project agreement with Microsoft. It was later discovered that it was entirely unresearched and baseless. If Reuters can make a mistake such as this, why are we crucifying Google for a similar type of error? The only responsibility of the news distributor, to my knowledge, is to retract a story found to be false. If a party is injured by the story, then there may be civil penalties. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that, if that becomes the case for Google, their pocket is deep enough to handle it.
The morale of the story? Don’t always believe what you read or hear, even if it does come from a “reliable” news agency.

By: charming

charming — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 04:39:00 +0000

Hmm…interesting story. Thanks to share.

By: seonewsblog

seonewsblog — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 02:01:00 +0000

Not that’s just funny. He probably was lucky he did this to a nice company like Google if i twas MSN for example he might have gotten sued.

Thank You

By: Tagging Secrets

Tagging Secrets — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 07:48:00 +0000

Someone already mentioned that Google probably should have some sort of flagging function so users can report potentially harmful posts to Google news and I wholeheartedly agree.

As for Google being responsible for the content that it aggregates, I disagree. Google should only be responsible for its own content and should not be held accountable for another website. Granted, it should swiftly remove any news sources which don't have a stringent policy on articles/news stories that are submitted.

All in all, this was a fairly comical prank and I doubt Tom's life is ruined because of it. He probably learned a much needed lesson, as did anyone else paying attention.

(On another note, it's already been raised here, if you're going to rag on the kid's spelling and grammatical errors, you would do well to check your own. Pot calling kettle black...)