I’m feeling lucky spam
I got a spam tonight that had a URL that led to Google. That piqued my curiosity, so I checked it out and figured out why it worked.
The spam was of the Canadian pharmacy variety. Just the usual stuff. So I tried recreating the URL, pointing to one of my sites.
Their URL was a variant on this:
http://google.com///search?hl=en&q=ann+elisabeth&btnI=5437
But it does work even without the ID at the end. So what’s the point? In my tests I couldn’t see the referrer when I used a similar URL, so it can’t be for referrers, unless they have tools that retain more info than regular referrer logs.
&btnI= at the end means this is the “I feel lucky” option Google uses. Which means if a site feels safe their site will be returned as the lucky site, then this sort of spam works.
January 5th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Looks like another way to get around spam filters, maybe? Primarily to get clickthroughs from the spammed site, I imagine.
January 6th, 2008 at 7:29 am
This is a problem knwon for some time, however Google doesn’t seem to do much about it
.
January 15th, 2008 at 1:13 am
I got one of those a while ago too. I can see two reasons for it. First is the obvious reason, to get around spam filters. It would be impossible to blacklist links to google.com. But it also may help the ranking of these pages if Google suddenly sees a lot of new traffic to the pages through their search engine. However, they will only work for either use in the short term. But a couple days is plenty for a spammer. The one I got now redirects to an antispammer blog:
http://www.google.com.br/search?hl=en&q=inurl:crazyremedy&btnI=I=
January 31st, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I recently wrote a post about this very thing:
http://www.igotspam.com/50226711/spammers_using_google_to_evade_filters.php
Seems Google isn’t rushing to do much about it either. They use Google’s Page Creator to get around spam filters.
February 11th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Not Google’s job to do anything about this. Smart spam filters should spam-trap any email containing a Google URL which has “btnI=5437″ within it, or any email containing a Google url which has “adrl” within it (a Google redirection trick spammers also make use of).
March 4th, 2008 at 11:50 am
I got spam from my own email address.