The Post Explains Those Spurious Search Engines

The CRC was recently embarrassed when a member complained to the Board of Education about gay dating services and gay porn on a high-school web site. It turned out that some of the links from the Outlook club had gone out of business, and the domain names had been bought by advertisers who implemented a kind of commercial search engine. So, for instance, if you look for Alltogether.com, which apparently started out as a "coming out" site for gays (see THIS article about it), you now find a kind of crummy search engine at that URL. The search engine returns "sponsored sites," so it gets paid when you click on the link.

A freaked-out CRC member put the word "gay" into the search engine and wow -- she got gay stuff. This proves, of course, that the gay agenda is taking over our schools. (Read HERE.)

The Washington Post this morning has a little article about these commercial search engines and how they're taking over the Internet:

Search-related advertising is fueling a new wave of Web sites that seem to have as much appeal as a cheesy Hollywood set. That's because many are created to look good to search engines, much as fake scenery fools TV cameras.

Everywhere I turn online these days I stumble over junky sites that do little more than clutter up the search results at Google and Yahoo.
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Search ads started as simple text links displayed next to regular results when you type a word like "camera" into a search box. Every time viewers click on one of the advertising links, the advertiser pays the search company.

Google and Yahoo have programs that allow those ads to be displayed on other Web sites and share the ad revenue with those site publishers, and Web sites have proliferated to take advantage of that. Some of the sites get you there under false pretenses, suggesting that you'll find articles about cameras but displaying only paid links of marginal relevance. Web Increasingly Cluttered By Sites Full of Paid Links

It seems that the people who do this, who put links on the web to these commercial search engines, really defend it as a service to the public.

The search engine ad industry appears to have touched off a moneymaking frenzy only slightly less intense than the original dot-com boom. But I can't help but think that this new wave is generating too many useless link directories designed to provide no value to site visitors, while making money the same way Google and Yahoo do, by showing links to sites that pay each time someone clicks on them.

So just think, when the CRC enters "gay" into the search engine and clicks on it, and then excitedly follows all those links to "meet hot gay men in your area," they are actually making money for these search engine companies.

They should take my advice, and search for things like "Bible" instead.