- - - - - - - - - -

T A B L E__T A L K

Is your ISP evil? Vent about the demise of customer service in the online world in Table Talk's Digital Culture area

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Challenge No. 6: Find-and-replace goofs
Plus: results of our "Ticklers" challenge
(02/20/98)

Caught in the headlights
By Aaron Weiss
What if we were as paranoid about cars as we are of the Net?
(02/19/98)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Once more, into the interactive-TV breach
(02/18/98)

Festival in search of a medium
By Karlin Lillington
Cannes' multimedia showcase loses its way
(02/17/98)

Metal madness
By Andrew Leonard
The battle for heavy metal on the Web
(02/13/98)

BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

- - - - - - - - - -

BY ANDREW LEONARD | Sara Pursley knew something was amiss. She had volunteered to create a Web site for "An American Gulag," a book that investigates (and denounces) the fast-growing phenomenon of private boarding schools for "defiant teens": schools that specialize in breaking the will of "hard core, acting-out" teenagers; schools where punitive "behavior modification" is the norm; schools that isolate teens from their families and friends; schools that require parents to authorize the use of mace and pepper spray on their own children.

For Pursley, the issue was personal: Her own brother had narrowly avoided being consigned to one such school.

One of Pursley's goals was to get the "Gulag" Web site highly ranked by the Net's big search engines. The Internet has become a major source of information for desperate upper-middle-class parents locked in battle with their troubled teenagers. Pursley wanted to make the full text of "An American Gulag" easily available on the Web, to counter the deluge of slick marketing propaganda for the schools -- referred to by their advocates as "emotional growth schools" and by their opponents (including some graduates) as "lockups."

The best way to attract a search engine's attention is to label your Web page with appropriate keywords. But when Pursley began researching to see what kind of results she could generate using specific keywords at search engines like Lycos and Alta Vista, she discovered something peculiar: No matter what word or phrase she tried, the same Web site kept popping up. And not just once, but multiple times -- at Lycos, for example, eight of the top 10 hits returned for the words "behavior modification" and "teens" were identical pages belonging to an outfit called Adolescent Services International. To her dismay, Pursley soon found hundreds of cloned Adolescent Services pages.

To the naked eye the pages all looked exactly alike. But a closer examination of the pages' HTML code revealed a devious techno-trick: Many of the pages contained batches of hundreds of slightly different keywords. They weren't properly labeled (keywords normally appear as part of hidden "metatags"). They were Trojan-horse keywords -- invisible to the normal Web surfer, but laying in wait to ensnare the search engines.

Pursley was furious -- and not just because the sneaky code created such a profusion of "decoy pages." Keyword spamming, referred to in the search engine trade as "spamdexing," is common on the Web. It isn't illegal, although the practice is widely regarded as horrid netiquette. Pursley's problem was with the perpetrator. She had encountered Adolescent Services before.

In her opinion, this purportedly neutral referral site directing parents to "schools for defiant teens" was actually one of the worst desperadoes in a bad bunch. Adolescent Services and its related organization Teen Help marketed a single set of closely affiliated schools located in regions as far flung as Western Samoa and Jamaica. These schools required parents to sign contracts allowing the use of mace, handcuffs and pepper spray on students; employed euphemistically named "escort services" to forcibly transport teenagers from their homes in the middle of the night; and strictly limited all contact between students and their families and friends.

"The spamdexing is obviously a flagrant violation of all search engine guidelines," says Pursley. "But it is more than that. The whole site is a violation of advertising ethics. For me it's a lot more relevant than some abstract cyber-issue, because it affects real people's lives: It misleads people about what options are available for their kids. These schools are absolutely unethical and manipulative from beginning to end -- from search engine rules to how they actually treat the kids."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

N E X T_P A G E | A knock on the door, and two burly men take you away

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN COPELAND