Searching Beyond the Paid

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Garbitrage Meets "Office Space"

If you haven't seen the movie Office Space, you must go and rent it tonight. It's one of the funniest commentaries on corporate life out there.

The main characters in the film work for Initech, a fictional tech firm. Today, a coworker was doing some research on Yahoo, and searched on unique gift ideas. She especially noticed the first organic result: for Initeck.com. We all got a good laugh out of the creative misspelling, and that was that.

Being the curious sort that I am, though, I went back and clicked on that listing - only to discover it's a GARBITRAGE site - running, of all things, Google AdSense ads! As these type of sites go, it's a good one: it appears to be an affiliate site, too, so they've got product photos, links, and a little bit of copy on their pages. Which is probably how they're ranking so well in the SERPs. But still, clearly the purpose of the site is to profit from Adsense and affiliate links, not provide useful content for visitors.

The site owner is brilliant, in my opinion (even though I hate garbitrage). They not only picked a great, clever name for their site, but they've figured out how to put one over on Yahoo. Yahoo, the joke's on you -- you're sending free traffic to this site, while Google makes money from it!

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