Kara & Michael’s Blog

I’ve been so amused and confused by gourmeton.com that I’ve continued to try to figure out what makes it tick, adding to my original post a couple of times. First I couldn’t figure out what translation system could possibly yield such terrible (yet strangely comprehensible) English, then I found a whole bunch of sister sites selling different products with the same mangled copy.

By this point I’m sure I’ve spent more time caring about these stupid sites than anybody except the people that created them, but I had to finally allay my curiosity. And here’s the result of my effort: It’s not a translator that makes gourmeton.com and its sister sites tick; it’s a thesaurus. They’re ripping product copy from amazon.com and then, for each word that isn’t part of the item title, choosing a random synonym from the WordNet thesaurus. The tipoff for me was the recurring appearance of the phrase “charles herbert best.” The medical researcher by that name is listed as a synonym for “best” in WordNet’s database.

Presumably the idea is to capture clicks from searchers who use a variety of search terms to describe what they’re looking for, and then send them on to Amazon through an affiliate link, collecting a portion of the proceeds. Not a bad racket, but the text they generate sure is funny.

I’m considering writing a “horribly broken English” filter program that does the same thing. It could be like the “bork, bork, bork” Firefox plugin that converts the text on all the sites you visit to Swedish chef speech — you could click a button and every site would look like gourmeton.com.

OK, maybe not.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS