So a funny thing happened to me on the way to the internet. I’ve been monitoring where things are at, seeing if anything new comes up, and lo. A new search hit on ask.com. Apparently there’s enough data on me on the internet now to put me on hiprank.com. Naturally, I don’t rate very well, but it seems well enough to appear on hiprank.com. The thing I found most amusing was that the first thing that appeared (the ranks have changed again since a few hours ago) was:
russian hacker vs shawn sijnstra
which was surprising to say the least. I didn’t even know that my “hipness” was being measured, but there you go. And compared to an apparently mysterious russian hacker. While the issues happened on a Russian registrar, I don’t think I’ve ever identified the “hacker” as anyone in particular. I’m wondering whether it’s just an ad placed with an interesing piece of AI to generate the pages (there’s a lot of ads on that page), or if someone added this stuff manually? Perhaps the same kind of spammers that offer “comments” on this blog to link to their products.
Upon closer inspection, it appears that I’m compared to everything that has been related in this blog about my identity theft. Perhaps a semi-manual process has been used to generate pages, inflating the content on hiprank? Next question though, is how did hiprank suddenly appear on the first page of results on ask.com? They are scraping in to the bottom of page 3 on google.com.au, and top of page 5 on Bing. Oddly enough, duckduckgo doesn’t care. Props to them for working out ask’s ranking scheme.