Tech
Googlle.com and Facebok.com and the 2010 Toronto Mayoral Candidates
What are googlle.com and facebok.com (other than a potentially common mistypings of the most popular search engine and social networking sites in the world, Google and Facebook, respectively)?
And why do they redirect to rore.com and afob.com - web sites that host brief surveys about Toronto 2010 mayoral candidates George Smitherman, and Rocco Rossi?
Why would anyone want to collect information about Toronto-specific politicians by luring in people with sloppy keyboard skills from all over the world? Wouldn't this result in the majority of those surveyed responding "don't know"?
A whois lookup for facebok.com points to a domain registrant in Germany. I've emailed the domain owner a query to find out why his/her site is redirecting to rore.com. Unfortunately rore.com's registration (which points to Vancouver) was made privately and rore.com also blocks archive.org from indexing previous versions of the page.
A privacy proxied formmail and phone voice message have also been sent to the administrative and registration contacts of googlle.com (which has previously redirected to porn and online prescriptions for Viagra) and afob.com but neither have been returned as of yet, so the mystery remains a mystery for now.
So far, all signs point to very weird anony-politico-spam-like behaviour by one or more local domain owners.
Hat tip to tattsjane on Twitter for bringing this to our attention.
Discussion
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Just a guess.
Yeah, it's just a stupid ad, and that's what Toronto people get.
Do they sell the information to marketing/advertising firms?
Who gets the age and gender info? How is it then relayed into advertising in my browser? Do the domain owners hosting these demographic-learning "ads" (that are masquerading as political surveys) benefit financially from this kind of thing?
Mystery semi-solved, but it's still strange and I'm glad you brought it up - are the domains/surveys paid for by consumer research companies? The Toronto candidate ones can't possibly lead to legitimate results, so what's the point of putting the money into it in the first place?