The early bird gets the fake press release. Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker, scarcely before the sun came up this morning, rubbed his eyes, sipped his coffee and did a spit-take as he read the press release headline: “Google unveils new erotica search engine.” Baker was able to wipe off his monitor, research the matter, and post about it by 7 AM.
Wow. At 7AM, I’m still trying figure out if my face will return to normal after sleeping on it all night. It usually does, but the hair’s a different story.
The lede of the press release read:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – September 15, 2005 – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today its plans to enter the lucrative adult content market with a new search engine that will be kept separate from its main line of search services.
The name of the search engine is Grotica, a new service that “uses sophisticated image processing tools to automatically categorize still photos and movies according to subject matter and degree of explicitness.”
Google’s new synonym patent, presumably, would power enhanced functions with “over 3000 synonyms for anatomical terms and erotic activities.”
The problem was, Grotica.com doesn’t work, and after looking up the WHOIS registry, the domain was found to be registered to WebMasterWorld, not Google.
“Hmmm, is something going on here?” muses Baker. “Perhaps Brett or one of the folks at WMW is trying to test out the editorial process of multiple press release distribution sites and especially those indexed in Google News.”
Baker, the early morning sleuth, was astute enough at this point in the morning to notice the contact information at the bottom of the release. Linda S. Boreman was listed as the one to question about it.
Who is Linda S. Boreman? One clue is the contact email address-lovelace@google.com. Boreman is better known as the star of the infamous seventies smut film, “Deep Throat,” when she was known as Linda Lovelace.
It appears to be a hoax. Nice detective work, Loren.
