*waves* Quick!

[Nicodemus Phaulkon]

Try this soon, before Google fixes its site:

1) Go to www.google.com

2) type in (but don't hit return): "weapons of mass destruction"

3) Hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button, instead of the normal "Google search"
button

4) read what appears to be a normal error message carefully.

[Chaerophon]

nt

[WarBlade]

Try this soon, before Google fixes its site:

Well they haven't done anything about it yet and they've had ample time already. I doubt the message will disappear any time soon.

[Yrrek]

Hahaha! That was great! *shakes hand of creater*

[Skandranon]

What will they "fix"?

That's not Google's error, it's a perfectly normal webpage, which just happens to be #1 when you search for "weapons of mass destruction". Hosted in the UK somewhere. Click Google Search and you'll see it as the first link.

-Skan

[Feryar]

\o NT o/

[--Pete]

--Pete

[Occhidiangela]

A couple of the links are rather droll. :)

Thanks, Nico, I may need to add to the "hydrogen and stupidity" universality the "sense of humor" as universal constants. Maybe I am being overoptimistic.

[Baajikiil]

nice tomacco

[DeeBye]

Do the above, but substitute "weapons of mass destruction" with "french military victories".

Try this soon, before Google fixes its site:

It's not really "broken". It's one of the many Google easter eggs, I believe. It's been like that for quite a long time now.

-DeeBye

[goldfish]

These sites (both WMD and French Military Victories) are neither bugs, hacks, nor Easter Eggs.

What they are are clevery-made spoof pages, photoshopped or HTML'ed to look like search pages.

The reason they come up on the "feeling lucky" button (which automatically takes you to the top-ranked page) is that the most popular and well-made spoofs have high google ranks.

In addition, people manipulate the google ranks of pages by getting others to link to them. This prank was first done by someone who got his friend's web page to be the number one hit for the phrase "talentless hack".

The details of these tricks have been reported online inmany places. See, e.g., :

http://slate.msn.com/id/2063699/
http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html

Edit: Ficks Speling.

[Premezilla]

Salutatiuons,

This may be kinda minor, but if you type in "gogole.com" as the address, it automatically takes you to the google page. Coincidence, or mass monopoly? The world may never know...

[naturelover]

Hehe, thanks Nico and DeeBye for the laughs.
And goldfish for the explanation.

Cheers!

[Wiccan]

They fixed it, just did it came up with:



Home » Top Stories »

Nature's Microscopic Weapon of Mass Destruction

By David Morris, AlterNet
April 11, 2003

As American troops sift through Baghdad rubble looking for evidence of manmade weapons of mass destruction, nature is mounting an increasingly impressive demonstration of the power of her own biological arsenal.


Nature's weapon was launched last November in the Chinese province of Guangdong when a duck farmer came down with what seemed like a severe flu. Thirty years ago the world might never have heard of that disease. Delivery systems were unavailable. But today the world's transportation infrastructure can carry biological threats much more effectively than Iraqi missiles. Microbial diseases spread as quickly as planes fly.


In February the first official case of what came to be known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). On March 16 WHO declared the illness a worldwide threat. Three weeks later it urged travellers to Hong Kong or Guangdong province to put off "non-essential" visits.


As of April 7 more than 2,600 people in 18 countries have come down with SARS. Julie Gerberding, director of the US Centers for Disease Control worries out loud about a global pandemic.


The number of people dead from SARS already exceeds the combined deaths of American and British troops in Iraq. Air travel to several Asian locations is grinding to a halt. The economic costs of the disease are approaching a billion dollars and the end is not yet in sight.


On April 5 the Economist reported, "Hong Kong is a ghost town. Offices are shut, conferences cancelled, schools closed and businesses right across the region are reeling." The Australian Financial Review declared, "The nerve centres of Asian economic growth have been virtually paralysed as a result of SARS."


The women's ice hockey world championship in Beijing has been canceled. The Asian Football Confederation postponed qualifying events for 15 nations for the 2004 Athens Olympics. The Port Authority of Thailand declared that all crews sailing from Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam would be prohibited from leaving their ships. More than 100 ships from SARS-affected countries travel to Bangkok and Laem Chabang ports each month, each with 20 crew members on board.


Bangkok airport now has medical personnel screening incoming passengers. The Australian government has told its citizens who fall ill abroad that they will be barred by health authorities in their guest country from boarding a plane home. Medical authorities insist that the death toll is really quite small. The percentage dying of SARS is similar to those who die of pneumonia. And they point out that unlike the 1918 influenza, whose microbes could travel long distances in the air, SARS is transmitted like the common cold, requiring physical contact or the inhalation of germs expelled by sneezing or coughing.


But such assurances have not stopped people from changing their behavior. In several Asian cities, according to the Australian Review, "People aren't flying, they aren't going to restaurants, they aren't socialising. No metal detector can detect a microbial threat. Taking off one's shoes won't help."


Panic has not yet visited the United States. In part this is because war news has pushed news about SARS off the front pages. In part it is because no one has died of SARS in the U.S., although more than 100 cases have been reported.


But SARS has arrived in Canada. A few days ago Toronto announced its ninth SARS-related death. More than 200,000 people will fly between New York and Toronto this month and many more will fly to and from Chicago and Boston.


More than 700 million people fly across international borders each year.


Globalization has its attractions. Global transportation systems have generated economic growth and cultural understanding. But along with its benefits, the global transportation infrastructure generates costs. In a village, when one family falls ill the entire village is vulnerable to the disease. And so it is in the emerging global village.


It is humbling and instructive to think that some of the commercial airplanes ferrying our troops to Iraq to search for biological weapons may themselves soon be unwittingly carrying biological threats back home.

unless of course this is it

[pakman]

Nope. What came up before was a page that looked like a 404.

Here it is.

EDIT: added link

[Obi2Kenobi]

his may be kinda minor, but if you type in "gogole.com" as the address, it automatically takes you to the google page. Coincidence, or mass monopoly? The world may never know...

Even more frightening is going to goggle.com... (do not attempt without a pop-up blocker...) or googol.com (safe without one) :ph34r:

[SwissMercenary]

To revive this thread, you can also type in "Miserable Failure", and hit the lucky button.

:D

[Brimstone]

:lol: that's pretty good.

[Obi2Kenobi]

Do you Yahew??

[Bob]

It seems to just link to normal yahoo, or am I missing something.
It's pretty common practice for large websites to register common misspellings of their name and point them straight at their real site - $30 per year will probably pay for itself in customers that would otherwise have been missed. To quote PC PRO magazine:
"Just talk to the people in your mailroom, they see most of the common misspellings every day"
(ok, that's not an exact quote, but it's near enough).
Of course, other unscrupulous people do a similar thing to leach the misspellings when people try to go elsewhere. You want to run an online bank? try registering a common misspelling of a big banking website and watch the customers roll in.
Every mistyped
batle.net
it's a popup spamming search engine. No I DO NOT want to change my blinkin' homepage, nor do I want a free email address, thankyou.

Don't tell me, I missed something, and I now look like the world's greatest idiot for typing all that out...

-Bob