| July 12, 2003
Google's
WMD bomb
Anthony Cox describes how his spoof error
page turned into a 'Google bomb' for weapons of mass destruction
Thursday July 10, 2003
The Guardian
In early February, I was reading online
a Guardian article about Hans Blix's problems obtaining cooperation
in Iraq. Immediately after, I was confronted with the ubiquitous
404 error page, which usually tells the reader that a website
is unavailable. With this serendipitous inspiration in mind,
along with a text editor and some fiddling in a graphics package,
I created a spoof 404 "weapons of mass destruction" error
page. Saddam would have been proud; the page (see copy
below)
was deployed and operational well within 45 minutes. After
favourable comments from friends, I posted it in the newsgroup
uk.rec.humour. Within the next 24
hours, the website had had 150,000 hits and had propagated to
118 newsgroups. >>> full
text
* Send
this page to your friends
Funny stuff, interesting stuff, important stuff, stupid stuff,
all sorts of stuff... Have you got something for this page?
|
