Copycat Food Websites

[Don Cuevas]

This post is NOT about how to make Cinnabon's Cream Cheese Icing or Cracker Barrel's Chicken and Dumplings; or even Wendy's Chili.

Ever look up a recipe on Google or whatever your search engine of choice, and when you start to open the results links, you find a large percentage of the recipes are the same? Word for word. Maybe the formatting and layout are different, but otherewise, the same recipe.

I find that annoying, time wasting but not worse than that. But there is worse.

What a surprise I had last Sunday afternoon, after posting a report on my blog about Restaurant Hacienda Los Arcos, Ziracuarétiro, Michoacán earlier that day.
See here: mexkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/04/hacienda-los-arcos-ziracuaretiro.html

During a Google search for a related item, I found a copycat website had lifted my blog post, including my photos, and reposted it. But what was really strange was that they seemed to have run my writing through a garbler and it emerged in a variety of English I'd never seen before. I didn't know whether to be outraged, flattered or amused, or all three.

See here: restaurantmexican.co.cc/hacienda-los-arcos-ziracuaretiro/

Other sites have been copied. Most are lifted from www.tulsafoodblog.com.

I got some tech advice as to how to deal with this, if I wished to, by one of my knowledgeable readers. That's where the situation stands now.

[bixaorellana]

Oh, that's awful, DonC -- so sorry it happened. What jerks! I clicked on the Home page and it's more of the same, so they must be poaching blogs all over the internet. I wonder why the text is automatically going through some kind of translation program. It would be amusing if it weren't for the circumstances.

[spindrift]

DonC - how lucky that you found that garbled blog. It seems like someone might want to upset you?

[Don Cuevas]

No, Spindrift, I'm beloved by everyone.

I think it's just an automated bot that collects blogsites in order to divert traffic to itself.

[fumobici]

It could be a bot collecting and republishing phrases from search results (many of which are gibberish, so it feeds on itself) directly in search of Google ad revenues for hits and click-throughs, or because its so cheap if you have server space, people publish pages of more or less random text from search results with numerous links to sites they are promoting embedded within to fool Google's link weighted site ranking algorithm. Most of the gibberish one encounters in web search results are in fact just people trying to game those algorithms for personal gain. Google and other search engines seemingly cannot discriminate for cogency so there's no incentive to make these search spider honey traps make any sense to humans.

So you have one automated algorithm trying to outwit another using human language fragments essentially as machine code. It has some superficial characteristics of human language but it's really just machine to machine litigation with each iterative step further removed from the human language it attempts to mimic or use. The search engines constantly alter their ranking algorithms (which are truly highly secret in a way few things genuinely are) and the coders trying to game them for profit by constantly probing them with varying inputs and measuring the outputs trying to reverse engineer insights into the secret search algorithms.

I managed to keep a business website at number 1 Google critical keyword rank for the better part of a year by constantly screwing with variables like keywords, metadata and link sharing. It's no longer so simple. In fact it's become so complex that one must completely automate the process. The result is the hideous babble that increasingly clogs the internet today.

[Don Cuevas]

Thanks for the insights, Fumobici, although I don't follow all the technicalities. But I grasp the concept.

[Deleted]

I have always expected everything that I have posted on the internet to be used, transformed, stolen or whatever. After all, already as per the TOS of ProBoards, they own everything on the site to begin with, as does just about every other site. Fodor's compensates me with free books for what they have published of mine, but apart from that I have sometimes encountered my photos in various places on the internet. Since I have myself used photos found on the internet (never passing them off as my own), I find that only fair.

[hwinpp]

Looks like they might have run your text through an online translator into Spanish then retranslated it back to English instead of just copying your text, DC.

[Don Cuevas]

My latest post wasn't copied, as far as I can see. I installed scurity cameras and other devices on the advice of an experienced friend.