Search engines are great, usually. You can look up anything and find the information you require, usually. But they're getting harder to use, regularly, due to a proliferation of search engine spam. Try searching for a placename and you'll end up with a selection of fake gazetteers and hotel-booking sites. Try searching for a film and you'll be plagued by sites trying to sell you a copy on DVD. Nothing new there. But now try searching for almost anything in a search engine and you'll be served up a long list of Wikipedia clones. These carbon copies all contain exactly the same information as Wikipedia, the original collaborative online encyclopaedia, but Wikipedia they are not. They trick you into thinking you've found a useful source of information whereas all you've really found is an ad-funded parasite. This is information spam, and it's getting worse.
1) Straight clones: artpolitic.org, creativevoyager.com, fixedreference.org, freepedia.org, musicvoyager.com, voyagenow.com
2) Clones, but with added adverts: campusprogram.com, encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com, encyclozine.com, england.asinah.net (and 20 similar sites named after different countries), explanation-guide.info, fact-index.com, fastload.org, finance.pixelmetric.com, freeglossary.com, infovoyager.com, knowledgerush.com, mcfly.org, nationmaster.com, nebulasearch.com, pedia.newsfilter.co.uk, searchlinx.com, therfcc.org, vagabondpoet.com, web-dictionary.org, wikiverse.org, wordiq.com, yourencyclopedia.net
3) Clones with spyware ads and nasty pop-ups: 4reference.net, brainyencyclopedia.com, informationblast.com, informationgenius.com, wikisearch.net
They're quite devious, these clones. All of them have names that sound like they're official knowledge-based sites. One hides its adverts amongst the normal links at the bottom of each page. Another describes itself, somewhat deceitfully, as an "up-to-date high speed static mirror". Another slyly suggests that "you might want to link to this article from your website". And the most underhand of all amends its web address each time to sound more relevant to your search (e.g. london-borough-of-enfield.wikiverse.org). I'm pleased to see that Google still hides most of this scum out of sight when you carry out a search, but alas they also seem to hide the original Wikipedia article too.
And all this cloning is quite legal. You can copy as much of the Wikipedia as you like, just so long as you include the relevant link ("This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License"). It's called copyleft, not copyright, and presumably the originators of this concept thought it was a great way to promote freedom of information. Unfortunately it also seems to offer freeloaders free information in return for no effort whatsoever. So it looks like we may be stuck with a proliferation of Wiki parasites clogging up search engines for the foreseeable future. You'd never find blogs doing anything like that, would you?
