The Sydney Morning Herald published an article entitled “New Australian search engine launched” today, the first paragraph of which reads “Australia’s newest search engine Ansearch opens for business today with a novel twist, demographic searching.” It’s not a particularly well written article, but the article vendor is AAP, not the SMH itself, so we’ll leave that alone, at least for the minute.

It goes on to laud the search engine for their innovation, both in this feature of demographic searching, and in other areas:

Ansearch says it cuts down search clutter by displaying the main search results as single websites and not the individual pages of websites.

What, like the Google [More results from domainname] feature? You know, the one that actually works properly? I say “works properly”, because a quick search of Ansearch reveals that their “cutting search clutter” feature is a tad broken — not to mention their character encoding.

Speaking of broken character encoding, let’s take a look at their source… well, they get some marks — at least they bothered with a Content-Type. Never mind if the content is broken when displayed with that Content-Type — it’s not like a search engine could actually do any useful data processing to make things display correctly when using a slightly redundant Content-Type… oh, wait, disregard that comment: they’re not using a doctype, either.

See, what gets me is that this search engine has just been launched. Which means the climate in which it’s been developed isn’t the same as 5 years ago, when accessibility was just on the very edges of the radar — you’d (wishfully) imagine that at least a doctype wouldn’t be too much to ask for, even if they still insisted on using table-based layouts. Interestingly enough, that’s what one of their software providers, Omniture, have done. Which leaves something of a foul taste in the mouth, too, because they’re reselling that garbage to people — including, if you believe their website, three of the five top Fortune 500 companies (aside: doesn’t that make them three of the top Fortune 5?).

Perhaps that criticism is unfair — their latest version (assuming that’s what powers their own website, although possibly not… maybe their internal web team accepts that their product would be overkill, and coded it in Dreamweaver, instead… some of the JavaScript certainly looks Dreamweaver-esque, and, if Ansearch’s website is any example, the doctype probably doesn’t come from the Overture system!) seems to handle much better than what Ansearch are running: I say this, because apparently they’re using a version which was written back in 2003. Hey, if it works… but we’ve already established it doesn’t.

And there concludes my rave review of yet another quite-some-way-from innovative and fresh search engine, this time in Australian waters.

Note: I’m not saying it’s any worse in terms of accessibility, usability, and semantics than most other search engines are — only that it has less excuse, being launched now, as opposed to 5 or 10 years ago. It’s easier to make something work first time than it is to haphazardly patch over it later, especially something as gargantuan as I’d imagine a search engine would be.

Oh, and now for something that’s just plain amusing — the number 1 search terms on this brand new search engine, from befuddled users wondering why it sucks so much:

Yes indeed, the first thing users did was try to escape… how’s that for telling?

Lycos spokesperson, Kay Oberbeck, is quoted as saying that “the [Make Love not Spam] campaign was only meant to be temporary”, it’s primary goals being to spark discussion and raise awareness — something which it has unquestionably achieved, perhaps in a realm far greater than that of just unsolicited spam marketing (I refuse to use euphemisms here — spam is unsolicited, intrusive, trespassing, unrequested and undesireable — not “direct marketing”). The campaign has raised questions regarding the state of regulation of the Internet, both in terms of anti-spam legislation, and the legality of “electronic sit-in” tactics, up to and including the use of distributed (collaborative) attacks on a centralised point.

Arguments over the semantics of what exactly constitutes a DDoS attack have also arisen as a result of this campaign: Whilst it’s generally accepted that this is indeed a distributed attack, the curious nature of the application, in that it attempts to raise the costs of spamming but not altogether “deny service”, coupled with the fact that participation in this campaign is user-driven (by way of active participatory choice), mean that this cannot be likened to virus-driven DDoS attacks seen in recent times, such as those upon The SCO Group’s website.

Not only is the basic question of what constitutes a (D)DoS attack raised, but also the question of what, exactly, is required for this attack to be considered “distributed”. Legally speaking, the attack has not been launched from any one co-ordinating point. The software distribution point and directory listing points were centralised, however these were not responsible for the independent actions of over 100,000 users^[1], who downloaded the software, and ran it.

Collaborative attacks such as this make litigation remarkably difficult, considering the very distributed participation — how can Lycos be sued for something they didn’t do? And, even if they could be sued for “something” they didn’t do, is it even legitimate to prosecute over a “denial of service” attack such as this? Some have commented that by connecting a computer to the Internet, you accept the possibility of such attacks implicitly — admittedly, this was posted on Slashdot, a (slightly more Left) IT news source, but the point bears consideration.

Was the campaign a “good” thing? In accordance with the stated goals presented to the world in hindsight, yes. Having said that, however, Lycos appear to have been standing on defensive footing for much of this campaign, denying events which the rest of the world seem to have witnessed, beyond most reasonable doubt (speaking specifically of the denial of the compromise of their website, either by a direct hacking, or DNS poisoning). Starring, the agency responsible for developing the Spray website (an arm of Lycos) and the Make LOVE not SPAM campaign, maintains the intention of the campaign is to increase the costs involved with SPAM advertising (as well as awareness raising and a promotional utility for Spray mail), something which everyone took as implicit, but (so far as I’ve seen) Lycos hasn’t explicitly stated^[2].

So what’d they do wrong, from a constructive perspective? Well, it was of a closed nature, for one. Lycos copped a surprising amount of criticism for this one from the mainstream media, specifically as “independent verification” of the nature of sources was unable to be performed — fears that the lists of offenders were corrupted remained unresolved, as public access to this information was not readily available ^[3]. If Lycos’s present stance on the project is legitimate, then the project rather deliberately remained closed in nature — if it were open, they would have an AOL-style Gnutella on their hands (admittedly, the situation of recall is remarkably similar, but the project hasn’t been able to get out of control due to a lack of publically available source code), arguably a worse corporate nightmare than the legal mess in which Lycos may find themselves entangled.

An open project would have allowed the project a greater chance of success, in that criticism pertaining to the validity of targets would be quelled, and even an official end to the project would likely permit a host of child-projects, all with the same goals in mind. The disadvantage to this, of course, is that community-powered vigilantism is far more susceptible to dubious attacks on innocent websites, due to it’s (comparatively) unregulated nature (if Lycos’s claims regarding the checking process are to be believed).

Will this spurn a host of similar projects? Probably. Such projects already exist, on a smaller scope — one project targetting Nigerian scammers is already in place — however none of them have enjoyed such widespread media attention as MLNS has from conventional press. Lycos’s position as a dominant European (and, to a lesser extent, American) portal has meant that their actions are far more closely scrutinised than those of small community bodies. Having said that, the popularity of peer-to-peer file-sharing applications didn’t come about as a result of mass media propagation, but rather through grassroots communication between peers, recommending the software to others.

Information Technology publications (both physical and electronic) played a part in making early adopters aware of these technologies, however the bulk of the work may be attributed to communities online who spread awareness of this software on a peer-based level. This technology has similar potential, on a far greater scale — it’s media exposure at launch was massive, and whilst it was rapidly removed (or censored), the amount of interest it generated offers projects which adopt a similar vein in the future a greater chance of success.

From a media perspective, future projects such as this will attract a mention, if only because of their similarity to this high-profile one. The ramifications of MLNS are great in scope; arguably, greater than Lycos have foreseen in the launch of this. Ultimately, this project demonstrates the power of the Internet as a tool for activism and collaborative empowerment — the true impact of these is something for which the world must wait and watch.

Notes

1. Actual downloads may far exceed this figure, given the rapid propagation of mirrors of this software, and the (highly questionable) actions of some backbone providers in blocking the official website, MakeLoveNotSpam.com — which raises a whole new set of questions pertaining to digital activism, if the providers to this form of self-enforcing electronic democracy are actively denying access to “questionable” facilities!
2. I’m quite open to being proved wrong on this point: so far as I can see, they haven’t stated that — I’ve been sifting through a decent amount of news material on the subject, but it’s more than possible that I simply missed it. If you feel otherwise, feel free to leave a comment/send me an email.
3. Admittedly, it was possible to access http://backend.makelovenotspam.com/xml/ for the data, but this wasn’t a highly publicised fact, and the methods by which this data was attained and verified remain shrouded in doubt.