by Dave Moore, CISSP
04/30/2023
Back in the early 1990’s when I started playing with the Internet, things were generally pretty peaceful. In 1994, there were less than 3,000 websites in existence. By 1995, that number had jumped to 23,500, with only 44 million Internet users worldwide. According to Forbes, there are now at least 1.13 billion websites, with Statista saying there are 5.16 billion people using the Internet. The Internet has devolved into a giant, uncontrollable, occasionally lovable mess.
Unfortunately, the Internet’s main strength, access to information, may be its main weakness, as well, as the amount of good information on the Internet seems to be in danger of being overwhelmed by the bad. If you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to mistake the bad information for the good, and vice versa.
Forbes Advisor reports, “A staggering 93% of global (Internet) traffic comes from Google,” with 85.1 billion Google.com visitors per year. They go on to report, “YouTube is the second most visited site with over 33 billion visitors.” In case you didn’t know, YouTube is owned by (wait for it; drum roll, please) Google.
In other words, it’s pretty much a Google Internet.
“Search engines” have long been the tool of choice for finding things on the Internet. The idea is that the search engine has looked at all the websites on the Internet and created a giant searchable index of what these websites contain. You tell the search engine what you’re looking for, it searches the index and gives you relevant things to look at.
Back in the 90’s, one had to use many different search engines in order to get good results, and even then the results were far from thorough. These were the days before Google, when search services like AltaVista, HotBot, Yahoo and SavvySearch duked it out for search supremacy.
Even in our modern times, Internet search results are far from perfect. Estimates are that search giant Google only covers a mere ten percent of the Internet, leaving the other ninety percent for people to somehow accidentally stumble across themselves. Competitors Yahoo and Bing offer even more dismal statistics. None of these issues seem to stop us in our quest for information, though, with Google.com processing 99,000 searches per second (demandsage.com).
These facts are not lost on the Internet bad guys. The bad guys are mostly con artists who succeed by tricking people into believing things that are not true. With billions of people using search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing every day to find information about every subject imaginable, the bad guys are turning to these search engines as the ultimate distribution channels for their scams.
As it turns out, manipulating Google to serve up bogus information is not particularly difficult. After all, Google’s job is to locate information; AI aside, whether that information is true or not is mostly left to humans to decide. This makes it easy for Internet crooks to pollute the Internet with fake websites and dangerous scams. Nowhere is this more evident than with fake tech support websites, which now seem to outnumber real support sites ten to one.
Next week: learning to tell the difference between real and fake search results.
Dave Moore, CISSP, has been fixing computers in Oklahoma since 1984. Founder of the non-profit Internet Safety Group Ltd., he also teaches Internet safety community training workshops. He can be reached at 405-919-9901 or www.internetsafetygroup.org