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August 31, 2003
Secret Computer Language!
By QBlog in
I've been reading over Ruth Carter's amazing account of the Amway subpoena's during the late 1990s. It primarily discusses how Amway sought to shut down several critical Web sites. One particular statement reminded me of the oddities on Quixtar's Dateline Response page.
The statement is a reported quote from (then) Amway Vice President Ken MacDonald sent out in December of 1997:
In that Amvox message, MacDonald stated:So, there is a history of Amway trying to modify search results. Nothing wrong with doing this, but it does say something about the motivation for attempting this tactic.
We've hired consultants and been working very diligently on all of the secret computer language that helps the search engines pick a site and because of that we've moved the positive Amway sites quite a bit up in the web search engines, and some of the negative sites down. And lastly, that we are working to provide very soon, for all those who qualified Emeralds and above who want it their own personal homepage so we will have tons of positive Amway information on the web."
Also, I should mention, that secret computer language doesn't really work anymore. Google has made meta tags almost irrelevant. That's why Dateline Quixtar still yields this site as a number one result.