Search Engine Journal

Porn Spam in Google’s Froogle

Looks like the porn uploads to Google Base are having a direct effect on Froogle as Barry Schwartz reports that some innocent searches for wrist rests led to some listings of ultra cheap $.99 products. After clicking on the product listings, Barry was directed to a porn page. Yes, like Google Base, porn is on Froogle like a fat kid on a danish.

I rarely use Froogle as my shopping search engine but for some reason, I did this time. And like most shopping search users, I sorted my results by lowest price. I was looking for the lowest price on keyboard wrist wrests and filtered the page as such.

The first result is a “Fellowes Premium Keyboard Mouse Tray & Gel Wrist Rests!” for only $0.99, now that is a good deal. But trust me don’t click, it is a pornography spam page. Seems like Shop Priest is good at Froogle spam.

It’s actually quite genius to market porn spam via price point on Froogle, as a good number of el cheapo’s must sort results by lowest price when comparing products. The end product is a site by Shop-Preist (funny name for someone pushing porn) with Amazon.com affiliate links on the page followed by “sex personals” ad listings.

One way to avoid such Froogle spam is to not click on listings without an image uploaded. If you look at the other sites Barry found listed by Shop-Preist in Froogle, you’ll notice that none have images.