Today, I just thought of checking out Google Trends which is a web service by Google showing what people are searching for on the Internet, and found that combination of Google Trends and Google Blogger is being used by people to spread computer virus, malaware and drive traffic to porn sites.

Looking at Google Trends for April 5, 2008, I got to know that there is a problem with Comcast and that there is an Internet outage as three terms related to Comcast were showing on the Google Trends page titled "Comcast outage", "Comcast network status" and "Comcast problems." Click open the images in a new window to see the full sized ones.

I went ahead and clicked on the link titled "Comcast network status" out of curiosity to find out what is happening with the Comcast network and found blog posts related to the same on the details page. I further clicked on the "More Blog Results" link to find out that there are 1,100 post related to the term "Comcast network status".

Now, I opened the first link marked inside the red rectangle in the image and it to me to a blog hosted on Google Blogger (Blogspot) which showed link about the comcast network outage and status. Clicking on any of the links on this page leads you to page asking for installing an ActiveX for watching video which is actually an executable file for sending virus to your system.

Now I clicked on the second link which I have marked red in the Google Blogsearch results image. The exact URL looked like this:

http://leech-therapyucvegrsxyz.blogspot.com/2008/04/comcast-network-status.html

Looking at the URL, you will feel that it is a blog hosted on Google Blogger and is related to comcast network status. But here comes the surprise; when you click on the link, you reach a page which is actually a porn site. The link redirects you to a porn site. Below is the image of its partial header. You can check the link yourself but be cautious as it is Not Safe For Work.

I am not sure whether Google Blogger allows you to redirect to any other page. To my surprise, the URL bar was still showing the same Blogspot URL even after this porn site was open. Not sure, how it could have been done.

The strategy which these people adopt is simple.  Keep an eye on Google Trends to see what people are searching for.  Create a blog post on Google Blogger which is free of cost and stuff it with the keywords that people are searching.  With Google’s free service and its love for keywords and title tags, these blogs rank higher in the search and get visits from people who get into an easy trap.

These were the examples of how people are using Trends and Blogspot to spread virus and porn. I found two other mysterious uses of this combination that are driving traffic to Lycos Pages and a Hong Kong YouTube Channel.

One of the URLs on the same search results page http://bennett-c323u0youe546.blogspot.com/ took me to a blog which was full of Google Trend hot links and clicking on any of the links to me a Lycos page. It looks like a link farm page but, again, not sure why would someone do that.

Finally, the biggest surprise.  The URL http://osnewsrenushe.blogspot.com/2008/04/comcast-network-status.html took me to a blog with a video player in all the posts.  Clicking on the video player in any of the posts took me to a YouTube channel’s page.  Now, why would someone try to drive traffic to a YouTube Channel related to Hong Kong. Can there be any motive behind it. To top it all, most of the video on the channel’s page show YouTube logo and banners in the background and the owner of this channel is YouTube Hong Kong as mentioned on the page. Is it YouTube itself driving traffic to the site using these techniques. I don’t think so but you never know. See it yourself.

Google Trends and Blogger are fantastic resources which are available for free. Unfortunately, people tend to use them in the way they are not supposed to be used. Is there anything that Google can do to curb these practices and keep these resources clean and useful.

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