Who ya gonna call?

[Nic Name]

The CIA has its Internet Special Agents really on top of this problem, ensuring that a Google search
for "Who ya gonna call?" finds their official logo of the war on terrorism ranked 2nd of over 10,000 hits.

If the CIA could convince Sharon to post these Terrorist Busters logos in all coffee shops, surely
they'd all be as safe as Starbucks in Seattle.

[snagglefish]

...interesting to note that although they come up second on a 'who ya gonna call' search, none of those words actually appear on the site or in their source code either.....are tons of people just linking them with a 'who ya gonna call' link....?

hmmmm.

[Nic Name]

I could tell you how they do it ... but then, I'd have to kill ya!

[Undertoad]

Nic... I'm surprised at you! Normally you're the one who points out connections to other IotD posts... this time you've duplicated one.

http://cellar.org/showthread.php?s=&...rorist+Busters

My guess: yup, people have linked to the site or image with that phrase. If enough people do it, Google will pick up the connection.

[That Guy]

Actually, the number of people linking doesn't matter anymore: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html. It seems they have a new technology.

[Nic Name]

UT, of course, I did a quick prior search here to see if there had been a previous post of this image, but the search capabilities of the Cellar don't match Google. Heck, we can't even do a search of the term "CIA" (probably for security reasons, since we don't all have the Toad's clearance level).

On the subject of the pagerank, Google has this to say for itself:

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

So, you see, UT's previous refering link from the Cellar, which must be regarded as one of the most "important" sites on the Internet, explains the mystery.

Unless, of course, the cia.gov site itself is regarded as "important" by Google for some reason. But that would be classified.

Does In-Q-Tel have an investment in Google?

We focus on identifying commercial analogs to the CIA’s own enterprise problems—where the needs of the market and the CIA meet. Our priority areas:

Internet Search and Discovery:

web crawling, indexing, ranking

Given that priority, they admit to investments in Intelliseek and Northern Light (and even SAIC, which explains another mystery), and Safeweb, but no mention is made of Google. They must not have heard of that one. hmmm.

[Nic Name]

The phrase "Who ya gonna call?" could be embedded in the .jpg using steganography.

The folks at In-Q-Tel could be working with the folks at Google to ensure that such "invisible" messages can be found by Google (like they do with .pdf) and read by Carnivore, or whatever friendly name that snoopdog is called these days.

This little Terrorist Busters piece of badly designed nonsense, that seems so "out of place" on a government website, may be an innocuous demo page for the CIA to illustrate the problem in a "live to Internet" unclassified environment. In that context, the graphic image is appropriately dumbed down to be representative of a terrorist webpage on the Internet, not of the official government website.

I don't think it is just an example of the cia.gov webdev team amusing themselves or trying to lighten up with a little giggle, as suggested by HB in the previous thread on this topic. But then again, what else do they have to do over there? MIB

[mhartzel]

Has anyone noticed the similarity to the Block button in AOL Instant Messenger?

[Nic Name]