While doing some keyword searching, I came across a phrase that had 3401 searches in January 2007: “motivation yblagulous.”

Since that’s an odd word, I was curious as to whether it might have been someone’s name, or perhaps there was some motivational blog or website calling itself Yblagulous, which would fit in with some of the odd Web 2.0 names out there.

Instead, I found this site: Dr-Mikes-Maths.Com.

Apparently, “yblagulous” was part of a Web Experiment he did. The experiment was done in “September” but I don’t see any indication of year. Nor was part 3 of the experiment concluded, so far as I have been able to find.

Anyway, the experiment revealed some of the automatically generated content sites out there, which we would today refer to as scraper sites. No human (well, except for me, maybe) would write about Yblagulous. A human would be unlikely to do a site around “yblagulous baby names,” as a person would recognize such a phrase was nonsense or would investigate the word further and discover it was nonsense.

Now, how yblagulous jumped from baby names to motivation is a different story. Then again, those scraper sites frequently generate rubbish, sometimes amusingly so, such as a site that mentions that naturalists will enjoy their “precise” information on “motivation yblagulous.” Okay.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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