Google will eat itself in less than 2^28 years
2 comments so far | by Dave ShawIf you're new here - welcome to Bloggle. Bloggle is an unofficial Google news blog providing a humourous slant on the day's most important, interesting and quirky Google news. You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
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Google is going down. You read that right - Google IS going down…in 202,345,117 years.
A group of clever Europeans have come up with a plan, dubbed ‘Google will Eat Itself‘, to bring Google under the complete control of the masses. Unfortunately at the current rate it’s going to take quite a long time.
According to The Register,
…for more than two and a half years, they have used an ongoing Google click fraud scheme as a means of acquiring hundreds of shares in Google stock.
This group, led by Hans Bernhard, hope to eventually buy the entire company and turn it over to the people. They run about 50 websites packed with Google ads which they claim generate clicks via a number of online robots. Using the money generated from these websites they automatically buy Google stock. As it stands they have bought 819 shares, worth $405k.
Sounds clever though I don’t know for how long they will get away with it or decide to keep ‘giving’ the cash away. In fact, I’m surprised that they haven’t taken more of the money for themselves. $405k isn’t small at all. If true, this shows how effective spam can be in generating cash. It would be easy to dismiss this story as unlikely but I’ve read articles before about the huge income spammers can make.
The group claim that what they are doing isn’t illegal because eventually they will be handing over Google to the public. How altruistic of them.
That IS a lot of money. Sounds like it will get shut down by google now, if only for adclick fraud.
According to ‘The Register’ article Google say about 10% of clicks are fraudulent (lots) but industry stats put the figure at 16% (loads).