Saturday, 9 October 2010

Web Trap Pages

I'm looking for an open source friendly accounting company to do my taxes and give me advice. The only reason I need a Windows box anymore is to do my accounting, since most accountants want their clients to use Windows-based software.

I typed something into Google to see if I could find an accounting firm that was open source friendly. I got one of those bogus pages that's just scraped together from bits of the internet by a computer program. Sleaze-balls put up sites like this to try to get you to land there from a search and then click on a link, generating ad revenue for the sleaze-ball.

The thing was, it took me a few moments to realize the page for what it was. It almost looked like a real site dedicated to open source accounting software. I thought, "wow, this sleaze-ball software is getting pretty good."

The I realized that it could also be that so many sites on the Internet are still so bad, that a computer can do as good a job as a person.

(Is this a variant of the Turing Test?)

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