This is why the Internet has gotten to be just about fucking useless:

[Redstone]

I was just reading a story about Monowi, Nebraska, which has a population of one. Yes, ONE.

So, like an idiot, I decided to read more about it by looking up "Monowi Nebraska" on Google. And what do I get? Do I get more ACTUAL INFORMATION? No, I don't. what I get is a bunch of google spammer assholes who use robots to put up such patently useless pages as:

-Discuss Monowi, Nebraska housing on our local forum with over 100000 registered users ... Rooms in owner-occupied houses in Monowi, Nebraska...
-This is a database of Monowi, Nebraska DUI Law information contributed by Nebraska drinking and driving lawyers who practice DUI law in and near Monowi...
-Locate Monowi, Nebraska business licenses and permits. Your one source for your business license needs...
-Find Monowi, Nebraska Truck Scales and Monowi, Nebraska Weigh Stations near you with our Big Rig Scale and Weigh Station Locator. Choose a scale location to ...
-Monowi, Nebraska's lodging site where you can find hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts, campgrounds, and lodging of all kinds. Many of the hotels listed ...

And my overall favorite (and this is just from the first two pages of a Google search that found 648 results for a town with ONE resident:

Monowi Drug Rehab Monowi, Nebraska Drug Rehab Alcohol Treatment Drug Treatment Centers Drug Rehabilitation Rehab Addiction Treatment Centers in Monowi, ...

Dude, one lady lives in that town, and she's 73 years old. I doubt like HELL that there are many drug rehab centers there.

Guys, forget the political debate about "save the Internet." It ain't politics that will kill the Internet. It's the sleazy asshole spammers (both email and search-engine spammers) who will kill the Internet by bogging it down with bullshit like this.

And I'm sure you all have your own frustrating examples.

Redstone

[Maestro]

1. And the bad thing is that enough lame, naive idiots

click on those links to make them worth their while for business. :eyes:

[Redstone]

6. That's so sad that I can't even think about it without getting a headache. Imagine my frustration

last week when I tried to find someone who does Autoharp repairs...I'm ready to give up, and the sad part is that I make a significant percentage of my living from developing websites.

Redstone

[Oeditpus Rex]

9. LIVE, NAKED AUTOHARPS WANT TO TALK TO YOU *NOW*!!!

Worst $83.67 I ever spent. x(

[Redstone]

13. AND LET YOU BORROW $574,675.00 FOR ONLY $178.23 PER MONTH!!!!

Redstone

[Maestro]

14. Hahahah!

Funny! Here's another.

Get played tonight by AUTOHARP in (insert name of your hometown).

[Oeditpus Rex]

15. Yeah, it's funny how

all those Hot Babes live right here.

And how those very same Hot Babes also live in Cedar Asses, Iowa.

:eyes:

[Redstone]

18. Good Lord, there's one I haven't seen. And I'm glad I haven't.

Redstone

[Maestro]

36. I left MySpace because I was sick of all the girls

that wanted me in (insert name of my hometown.) I'd never been so falsly popular. :eyes:

[electron_blue]

2. You made me laugh. Thanks!

.... i know you meant it as a rant, and I agree, but the way you put it just made me LOL, esp about the drug rehab.

[rug]

3. I was sorry to read Rudy died.

Hang in there Elsie.

[Redstone]

7. I want to call her tomorrow and ask her if Mrs R and I can move there and help her

with the bar / restaurant / town and take over for her when she wants to retire.

A place like that should NOT ever die completely.

Redstone

[rug]

8. You know, you should at least drop her a line.

I see a story developing.

[Redstone]

11. Please, PLEASE don't encourage me. You do know that I'm a loose cannon, and just

as likely to go ahead and do something rash like that as not, don't you?

Redstone

[hfojvt]

4. i do not understand

I get this from google

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=monowi+nebraska&btnG=Search

[Redstone]

10. OK, in your first two pages you got:

-Monowi, NE (Nebraska) Houses, Apartments, Cars, Mortgage Status ...
-Monowi Hotels: Compare Hotels in Monowi, Monowi Hotel Reviews ...
-Monowi Restaurants - MYTravelGuide - Reviews and research on all Monowi Restaurants, Hotels, Attractions and more. ... Popular Nebraska Destinations ...

I'll grant that you got less spam by leaving off the quotation marks, but one should expect that by narrowing a search through the use of quotation marks, one would receive more relevant information because of performing a more specific search, would one not?

Redstone

[PeaceNikki]

17. OK, but...

Monowi, NE (Nebraska) Houses, Apartments, Cars, Mortgage Status = city-data with mortgage rates and housing and uh... demographic info. Seems relevant for a Google search on a city to me. There are no ads on that site.

And, gosh - come to think of it, hotels and restaurant guides seem pretty standard and well within a spectrum of reason when searching a US city. There were a ton of useful and interesting links, too. Most, in fact are.

I still think the internets are way useful.

[Redstone]

20. Uh, no. There are NO HOUSES in that town, except for the one the ONLY RESIDENT

lives in. NO car dealers. NO apartments. NO demographics; did you notice that there's ONE RESIDENT?

You want to defend Google spammers for whatever reason, be my guest. But I'm not buying it. Those sites have NO information about that specific town, so why should they turn up on my search for that specific town?

Redstone

[PeaceNikki]

22. Dude. Check your blood pressure.

I'll leave you be - you stay pissed off and work yourself up into a tissy over a whole lotta nothin'.

There's a lot of shit to be pissed off about in this world... but, dude - that Google search isn't one of them.

Get a grip. For real.

[PeaceNikki]

24. You edited out the part about...

"my bullshit".

It doesn't have the same "je ne sais quoi".

[Redstone]

27. So I realized it was too harsh and tried to tone it down. If that's a problem for you,

there's always the "ignore" function.

Redstone

[PeaceNikki]

30. And, if you think I am full of "bullshit", I encourage you to do the same.

;)

[hfojvt]

19. Those are probably very useful pages

for bigger towns.

I got the same thing with quotation marks. Is the fault with your browser?

[Redstone]

23. You don't understand, do you? There are NO apartments, nor mortgage companies, nor

truck scales, nor car dealers in that town, dammit!

So why do those websites purport to give me information on, for example, CAR DEALERSHIPS in a town that DOESN'T HAVE ANY???

That's spam, pure and simple. It's dishonest and sleazy.

Redstone

[hfojvt]

32. not relevant for this one town

but still a very cool site, going back to the county:

http://www.city-data.com/county/Boyd_County-NE.html

[PeaceNikki]

34. Those aren't ADS... they are city GUIDES. Any city with a population shows up.

If there are matches for apartments, or mortgage companies, or truck scales, or car dealers in that town - they'd be in a handy list - on which the companies pay to be listed - or not.

It's not "dishonest" or "sleazy" - a page has a database with cities and displays the data it has - if any. In the case of this small little place - guess what - no apartments, nor mortgage companies, nor truck scales, nor car dealers .

Why are you so hellbent on making villains where none exist? Does that make you "Mr Virtuous Marketing Dude" or just "Super Angry Guy"?

[Lance_Boyle]

50. It is not, by definition, SPAM.

You went looking for it. SPAM finds you on its own.

[idgiehkt]

5. they are doing the same thing on youtube

they have 'tags' that they can add to the video that will come up on a search, and some add like the numbers 1-20, and then the entire alphabet, and then every obscene word they can think of, etc etc just so it will come up like that no matter what search terms a person puts in.

Honestly I mainly go straight to wikipedia for stuff like this now, but even that might not be in wikipedia being that the town is so small.

[Kutjara]

12. You hit the nail on the head, as usual, Red.

These bottom-feeder, waste-of-breath, numbnuts parasites suck the life out of everything. Before the internet, they filled TV and radio with crap. Before that, they turned print journalism into filler between ads. Before that...well, suffice to say that I strongly suspect some of the cave drawings we regard as the pinnacle of neolithic art are in actuality adverts paid for by used bison salesmen.

Humanity is a species that carries its shit with it.

[Redstone]

16. And Jesus, how bad do you suppose I feel, seeing all that crap, given that

I'm in the advertising & marketing business?

But at least my soul doesn't need to be saved, because I do NO commercial or consumer work...only businesses who sell to other businesses.

I'd have to take a bath in Clorox every night if I sank low enough in the sewer to have to resort to Google or email spamming. People who do that are beneath contempt.

Redstone

[Kutjara]

21. Same here. I nightly thank Mammon that I work...

...in business to business marketing. I console myself with the thought that I'm a parasite feeding on other parasites, so that makes it ok. I think.

[Redstone]

26. No, there NO parasitism involved in B-to-B whatsoever. Seriously: What business

does NOT buy parts from other businesses to make their product?

Furthermore, let me paraphrase from my marketing book: In consumer advertising, you have to create a "perceived need;" in other words to convince the consumer that she can't walk around the block as well whle wearing a pair of $30 sneakers as she can while wearing a $150 pair of "Cross Trainers."

In B-to-B marketing, on the other hand, the customer really DOES need to buy what you make in order to build his product; your job then as a B-to-B marketer is to tell him why it will be to his benefit to buy that product from YOU, rather than from your competitor.

And that's why you are NOT a parasite, capisce?

Redstone

[Kutjara]

31. Ah, but you're enabling your business customer to then...

...create a product for which the ultimate consumer has no real need. So we're sort of parasites once removed. Or metaparasites, if you will:)

[Joe Fields]

25. I can see why it might bother you, since you're in advertising.

Personally, I just ignore that garbage. I still have a lot of good uses for the internet. Just don't know how long before it ends up becoming "pay as you go." That is the real danger to the web.

[Redstone]

28. Ignoring it is OK, and I do that, but my point was that it make the Internet much less

useful when you have to wade through all spam and garbage to find what you're looking for.

Another reason why I still use the Yellow Pages frequently. It saves me a bunch of time.

Redstone

[Joe Fields]

39. hell the fuck yeah. only now they've gone and made the type so

goddamned small I need a magnifying glass. But I'm half blind anyway.

[begin_within]

29. Thanks - I was just about to click on "Find singles in Monowi, NE tonight"

[rug]

33. You're guaranteed to find a single in Monowi.

[begin_within]

35. Yeah but is she into latex and Omorashi?

[rug]

38. Refine your search and you'll get the answer.

[achtung_circus]

40. Well, I learn something every day.

whether I want to or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omorashi

(latex I "get")

[begin_within]

43. Wikipedia is the most unreliable source of information that has ever existed.

[achtung_circus]

45. Well

it's a starting place, and can be useful if the citations are real and can be followed. I n this case I didn't feel it was necessary to check citations.

I'm sure I'm missing out the nuances, but TMI can be absorbed.

*Spelling fart*

[begin_within]

46. Thanks - what is "TMI?"

[achtung_circus]

48. TMI

= too much information.

:wow: :P

[begin_within]

52. OK thanks

[nickgutierrez]

37. That old lady must be the world's biggest junkie.

Why else would they need that many rehab centers and truck stops?

[BlooInBloo]

41. I actually have little/no trouble nearly instantly finding any information I'm looking for...

... "The internet knows all" is a common refrain my friends hear from me. I may just have been lucky thus far.

[Kajsa]

42. Ah-Ha! Mrs. Eiler runs a tavern

with customers coming as far as 80 miles.
Mr. Eiler died three years ago, leaving her the sole inhabitant.

No mention of rehabs on Wiki.

Wiki may not be perfect, but it cuts through the
maddening BS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monowi,_Nebraska

:hi:

[distantearlywarning]

44. You just identified my #1 peeve about the Internet.

Goddamn portal sites.

It wouldn't even be so bad if they were actually helpful in some way, even if it wasn't helpful to me right at the moment of searching. But they aren't. Every single one of those stupid sites is just a bunch of random words strung together and the links never go anywhere. Even if you actually wanted, say, drug rehabs in Monowi, if you clicked on the stupid link it wouldn't help you find one.

Something that mystifies me is why they even exist in the first place. I always thought spammers wanted to make money. How can they make money from portal sites that don't actually go anywhere where someone is selling something? Why pay money for an entire website devoted to random strings of words and dead links? Seems like bad business to me...

[Redstone]

53. And what's worse, they register URLs that are misspellings of other URLs. Try these:

http://www.democraticunderround.com/

http://www.democraticunerground.com/

Scumbuckets.

Redstone

[Throwing Stones]

47. The great thing about an unregulated internet, though

is that there are programmers out there who'll figure out how to beat the spammer scum, at least for a little while, then the scum will figure a work around, ad infinitum. If some one or some group was put "in charge" of trying to "fix" all that's wrong, I think we'd lose a lot of the ingenuity (used for both good and bad motives).

I know it was meant as a rant, but that was pretty funny, too.

[slj0101]

49. See hot, wet MILF Monowi, Nebraska live now!

[realisticphish]

51. It's all background noise to me

I didn't exactly grow up on the internet, but I've spent a LOT of time on it. Such things just don't bother me, because I've grown used to sliding right past them.

God knows what it looks like to older people who have never used the internet. Must be terrifying