WJhonson@aol.com wrote in message news:cde.51a20c14.37c33df8@aol.com...

In a message dated 8/23/2009 6:07:11 AM Pacific Daylight Time, brewhaha@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca, I wrote of a common spam complaint that is either fraudulent or dangerous.

It's a bit rough to complain about Wikihow in this regard. It's quite likely that any "Ads" of this sort come either from vandals or from some kind of affiliate network. Your link does not work for me. What you should do, if you want to produce evidence, is actually copy the URL for the exact link. Google searches change for different people, and over time.

It turns out that the result I was looking at was not to the wikihow site, just a use of their name. Upon waking, I realized that the issue (now) is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spamdexing (page rank manipulation), where people put popular search terms into their title, description, or domain name and those words hav nothing to do with what someone is selling.

Even though wikihow does host adsense, I do not think that means everything that adsense might entail. Nobody has a trademark on wiki, as far as I know, and it certainly did become synonymous with collaboration, while the how part of wikihow is clearly howto. The site I found is neither wiki nor howto, even though they hav wikihow in their title.

I would ask google to down-rank wikihow in titles, except I see that sometimes wikihow does use its own name in titles. To a lawyer, it is a hard case of trademark infringement, involving the credibility of collaboration. To me, it is spamdexing.

I should ask google to up-rank wikihow if it occurs in a domain name, and down-rank wikihow if it occurs in a title. They can do either, neither, or both; wikihow would benefit from either. They might say that would make their search engine less objective, and I think wikihow is naturally more objective, plus it is already a sponsored site. _______ Go deliver a dare, vile dog. Forrest Zen: I am one with the chocolate.