Brooklyn Merchant Games Search Engine's "Secret Formula"

The Holy Grail for just about any enterprise or enterprising individual working the online world is a top search engine ranking. Corporations, non-profits, and the merely ambitious invest profound amounts of time scheming ways to make their way up search's slippery slope. "Search results," typically displaying the ordered gathering of the results of a misguided popularity contest, has largely done a disservice to the prompt identification of useful, accurate information.

Then again, very few search users have any idea at all about the generation and ordering principles of the information they obtain through search engines. Search firms have made the understanding of their information gathering an arcane, oblique exercise, akin to a secret formula only selected initiates may fully know. In some ways, it's easier to figure out hieroglyphics than to muddle through the sanctimonious explanations

of seemingly sacred algorithms.

An example of how the SEO fever has gone awry is provided courtesy of a story in the Los Angeles Times. The article details how a cynical Brooklynite gamed the SEO system in a way that the Russian novelist Dostoyevski (shown in the photograph) would have appreciated. The Times story relates how eyewear merchant Vitaly Borker, by doing everything possible to antagonize and cheat his customers, goaded them into making nasty online posts about the Brooklyn storeowner's behavior. Ironically, the sheer magnitude of posts landed Borker at the top of the SEO heap (presumably, in his category). He bragged about how he had found a glitch in the world's most popular search engine, and played it for all it was worth. He even bragged to a New York Times reporter about his skills.

Well, it didn't take long for Borker's arrest. The search engine firm quickly fixed the "anomaly," according to the Los Angeles newspaper.