jenniferdebeer

disputes and old ways

This past Friday we had a follow-up lecture on domain name disputes. The first lesson we had in this series; ifyou want to view it that way, dealt with behavioural aspects in that we looked at cases where it was obvious that cybersquatting had taken place etc. This time around we looked at more technical reasons for domain disputes, e.g. and i.a. word stuffing (you know, when you hide keywords in the page); abusing metatags to also get hits, etc.

Now, anyone who´s been on the net for longer than 8 years will know that this kind of jippoing is almost a legacy by now. What do I mean? That we know, as web developers, that these kinds of abuses took place then, but really, it´s hard to believe that people are still resorting to this kind of abuse. Must be amateurs.

Well, I´d asked the lecturer after the class whether he was of the opinion that the cases being pursued, where these abuses had taken place, weren´t more historical examples than stuff from the present. He opined that it was more the case that people didn´t pursue these affronts legally anymore (due to the costs incurred), than that these abuses weren´t happening. Yes, point taken. Yet, it is that most search engine technology has advanced to the point where bots/agents are able to ignore this kind of trickery. I guess my underlying gripe is that there was an unacknowledged assumption in the lecture viz. that the technology has been static and has not evolved to circumvent these abuses. ...Okay, enough said.

posted by Jennifer A. DeBeer @ 08:34