Martin Luther King Jr, or how the Internet fascinates me
A few months ago, I looked at Martin Luther King, Jr’s mug shot on The Smoking Gun and was intrigued by the scrawl on the photograph with the date of his death. I didn’t know that he died on April 4th, which struck me as an unlucky day to begin with, if you believe in that sort of thing. That night, in one of those impulsive search moments, I decided to look up more info on King via Google. It was then that I came across the seemingly innocuous martinlutherking.org.
The search martin luther king turned up these results.
Now, the front page of martinlutherking.org gives the website the appearance of being an “educational” resource about King. Before delving into any other part of the website, there are two odd items on the front page: a quote from a Newsweek article and a link to “Why the King Holiday Should be Repealed!” Pretty soon, you’ll find out the website is just a scam by white supremacists.
This is to whom martinlutherking.org is registered.
Don Black, huh?
So, I must admit that I was both disturbed and fascinated that this website existed and that it could have received such a high ranking in the search for martin luther king. However, if you search for martinlutherking without any spaces, these are the search results:
The description from the first search is from the website’s meta tag. I wonder how the description was changed in the second search. I have a suspicion that it’s either an editorial decision or some sort of manipulation is going on, like the miserable failure search.
I’ve always been fascinated with the possibilities of search engine manipulation. Several years ago, I came across a website for Asian American women, where the creator had used porn keywords to lure people to her website, which had nothing to do with porn, and was about culture and education. She said she received a lot of hate mail for this experiment. I don’t remember the website name or URL and I wish I could find it (if it still exists), but unfortunately every search I do with the words Asian and women inevitably turns up real porn, instead.
By the way, if you want to mention the martinlutherking.org website anywhere on the web, take the advice from Ed-Tech Insider and use the tag rel=”no follow” to prevent Google from increasing its PageRank.
17 January 2006 – 12:00 AM