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How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew
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| This has caused an enormous spike in traffic on sites across the web,
| including The Register, and many webmasters may not realize where these hits
| are coming from. Hoping to fool malware writers, LinkScanner mimics real live
| human clicks. At least in part.
|
| [...]
|
| To avoid confusion, we've updated this story to point out that webmasters are
| filtering traffic by identifying both the missing HTTP header and the IE6
| agent. It should also be noted that LinkScanner seems to be using two other
| user agents. But these are far less prevalent. At the moment, these are the
| three user agents the product seems to employ:
|
| Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
|
| User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
|
| User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/02/linkscanner_fake_traffic_temporary_fix/
Yet another reason among so many that 'surveys' are hugely biased and
meaningless.
Recent:
AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6
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| In late February, AVG paired its updated anti-virus engine with a real-time
| malware scanner that vets search engine results before you click on them. If
| you search Google, for instance, this LinkScanner automatically visits each
| address that turns up on Google's results page.
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/26/avg_disguises_fake_traffic_as_ie6/
Bots rule in cyberspace
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| USA TODAY REPORTS that on an average day, 40 per cent of the 800 million
| computers connected to the Internet are bots used to send out spam, viruses
| and to mine for sensitive personal data.
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http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/03/17/bots-rule-cyberspace
Related:
Bots Helped To Boost Microsoft Live Search Gains
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| In a blog post, Compete analyst Steve Willis attributed Microsoft's
| search gains to prizes awarded to users participating in Live Search
| Club, which features games that post queries to Microsoft's search
| engine.
|
| [...]
|
| Microsoft is essentially being DDoSed by thousands of people hundreds
| of times per minute, but they are mistaking this rise in traffic for
| people actually using Live Search."
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http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201001092
Microsoft funding bankrupt Live Search experiment with porn spam
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| Dear reader, please tell me: what do you think of a search engine that steals
| (bandwidth and AdSense revenue), lies, spams away, and is not clever enough
| to stop their criminal activities when they’re caught?
|
| Recently a Live Search rep whined in an interview because so many robots.txt
| files out there block their crawler...
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http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/microsoft-live-search-the-downfall-of-a-tiny-search-engine/
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