Weirdly Useless Dummy Web Sites

Questions, speculations & updates on the techniques and nature of media fakery
hoi.polloi
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Joined: Sun Nov 14, 2010 7:24 pm

Weirdly Useless Dummy Web Sites

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

I realize this isn't a great post because it doesn't exactly point to a specific crime, but it's more along the lines of the thought, "What kind of weird human behaviors can we notice, that nobody talks about?"

And one of them which has always puzzled me — and yet so often slipped to the back of my mind because of the way in which really odd and stupid and suspicious things seem so ordinary in society — is the number of completely stupid web sites that seem to serve no purpose except as, perhaps, a test of Artificial Intelligence programs and their ability to quickly draw up web sites.

I suspect that while some of them are for some theoretical ad revenue, the real reason behind these sites is to constantly blur our understanding of what makes a "real" web site like, I dunno, Samsung.com — which perhaps is earnestly lying about actual products — and what makes a half-real half-fake site like Facebook — which is chock full of fake profiles, AI programs and intelligence gathering. Perhaps if these dummy sites or fronts are actually designed by programs, it would explain how moronic they appear to be. Yes, it could be for advertising. But as we know, PR is also a military tool.

Just as an example, take http://www.organicaginfo.org/

On this site, you can click on hundreds of pages of the same text, with minor word variations. States and cities swapped for one another. The text looks like copypasta from an unknown dictionary definition or basic promotional material recycled as a web page. At the bottom you have some kind of official looking copyright information.
orgag_front.JPG
orgag_front.JPG (69.39 KiB) Viewed 4373 times
orgag_geo.JPG
orgag_geo.JPG (52.81 KiB) Viewed 4367 times
orgag_alas.JPG
orgag_alas.JPG (53.63 KiB) Viewed 4367 times
The WHOIS information for the web site is like this:
Registrant Name: Ryan Russell
Registrant Organization:
Registrant Street: 2128 sage creek loop
Registrant City: austin
Registrant State/Province: Texas
Registrant Postal Code: 78704
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: +1.888642967
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Yup, that's a 1-888 number.

Anyway, has anyone else come across this sort of "quirky" (practice ad prop? front?) site while searching using Google or Yahoo or some other engine? And does anyone else get the weird feeling that some of these sites are spontaneously generated based on user search analytics? And what are they for? Internet "Filler"?