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Democrat Election Site Spamming Search Engines

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Martin Burns

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User since: 26 Apr 1999

Articles written: 143

Inspecting the source code for Al Gore's election site, I noticed that the Democrat candidate trying to ensure that his site comes up when users search for 'MP3', which reputably is the most common search term across public search engines, by putting it in his meta-tags.

We also find that he's embedding hidden messages into the code - I wonder what happens if you play the following backwards:

<!-----------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for checking out our source code! I plan to use this space to post

special messages to those who are helping to improve our web site -- by making

our site the best it can be. The fact that you are peeking behind the

scenes at our site means you can make an important difference to this Internet

effort. I'm grateful for your help and support in this campaign. Now let's

keep working to build the 21st Century of our dreams!

Al Gore

-------------------------------------------------------------->

Anyone notice any easter eggs in the Republican site?

Martin Burns has been doing this stuff since Netscape 1.0 days. Starting with the communication ends that online media support, he moved back through design, HTML and server-side code. Then he got into running the whole show. These days he's working for these people as a Project Manager, and still thinks (nearly 6 years on) it's a hell of a lot better than working for a dot-com. In his Copious Free Time™, he helps out running a Cloth Nappies online store.

Amongst his favourite things is ZopeDrupal, which he uses to run his personal site. He's starting to (re)gain a sneaking regard for ECMAscript since the arrival of unobtrusive scripting.

He's been a member of evolt.org since the very early days, a board member, a president, a writer and even contributed a modest amount of template code for the current site. Above all, he likes evolt.org to do things because it knowingly chooses to do so, rather than randomly stumbling into them. He's also one of the boys and girls who beervolts in the UK, although the arrival of small children in his life have knocked the frequency for 6.

Most likely to ask: Why would a client pay you to do that?

Least likely to ask: Why isn't that navigation frame in Flash?

The access keys for this page are: ALT (Control on a Mac) plus:

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