{"id":3306,"date":"2011-05-15T16:21:53","date_gmt":"2011-05-15T23:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=3306"},"modified":"2020-07-26T00:02:43","modified_gmt":"2020-07-26T07:02:43","slug":"cloaked-archive-wiki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/cloaked-archive-wiki\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloaked Archive Wiki"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google’s Chrome browser has made me phenomenally lazy. I don’t even attempt to type proper, complete URLs into the address bar anymore. I just type something vaguely related to the address and let the search engine take over. I saw something weird when I used this method to visit Archive Team’s site<\/a>:<\/p>\n


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There’s greater detail when you elect to view more results from the site:<\/p>\n


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As the administrator of a MediaWiki installation<\/a> like the one that archiveteam.org runs on, I was a little worried that they might have a spam problem. However, clicking through to any of those out-of-place pages does not indicate anything related to pharmaceuticals. Viewing source also reveals nothing amiss.<\/p>\n

I quickly deduced that this is a textbook example of website cloaking<\/a>. This is when a website reports different content to a search engine than it reports to normal web browsers (humans, presumably). General pseudocode:<\/p>\n

\r\nif (web_request.user_agent_string == CRAWLER_USER_AGENT)\r\n  return cloaked_data;\r\nelse\r\n  return real_data;\r\n<\/pre>\n
You can verify this for yourself using the wget<\/code> command line utility:<\/p>\n

\n$ wget --quiet --user-agent=\"Mozilla\/5.0<\/strong>\" \\
\n  http:\/\/www.archiveteam.org\/index.php?title=Geocities -O - | grep \\<title\\>
\n<title>GeoCities - Archiveteam<\/title><\/p>\n
$ wget --quiet --user-agent=\"Googlebot\/2.1<\/strong>\" \\
\n  http:\/\/www.archiveteam.org\/index.php?title=Geocities -O - | grep \\<title\\>
\n<title>Cheap xanax | Online Drug Store, Big Discounts<\/title>
\n<\/code><\/p>\n
I guess the little web prank worked because the phaux-pharma stuff got indexed. It makes we wonder if there’s a MediaWiki plugin that does this automatically.<\/p>\n
For extra fun, here’s a site called the CloakingDetector<\/a> which purports to be able to detect whether a page employs cloaking. This is just one humble observer’s opinion, but I don’t think the site works too well:
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\n<\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is what website cloaking looks like<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t