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Competitor Attempts to Steal Product Descriptions.. Gets RickRoll'd

29 points by mkull ↗ HN
So today I noticed an interesting referer while tailing my ecommerce website's production.log file

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=ZXN2S645SXNTG6SRHV5Z (Notice the link at the top of the page links to revzilla.com (my site), sometimes it swaps to an amazon.com product so just refresh that page if it does)

Apparently someone had created a mechanical turk which is paying people to reword / paraphrase our product descriptions (I assume) for use on their competing website. We can't be having that so I added a simple rule to redirect any Mechanical Turk referrers to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU :D

18 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] thread
jakewolf
For $0.76 they're also overpaying for the HIT.
pg
We used to redirect competitors (based on their ip addresses) to their own sites when they tried to log into our software.
softbuilder
They need to get vunk'd or if you're extra mean throw some 2G,1C their way.
apathy
meatspin.com

Always good for laffs when the boss walks by

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PhillyEmpire
2G, 1C = game over. That's what I would have done.
enonko
Next time they will not link directly to you but redirect through something. Or simply copy-and-paste your content into the job description. It's a waste of time trying to fight this...
nilobject
Who cares? It's fun.

Same with pranks at the office. Total waste of time, but huge morale boosters.

jcl
It might have been more effective to redirect them to a randomly chosen product description from a set of, say, fifty. They'd likely have wasted a lot of Turk time rewording those fifty descriptions before realizing what was going on.
marc_fawzi
Those who live by the gun, die by the gun.
[dead] troppo
In before proxy.
inovica
What is the affect of this on your Google ranking? Just curious as to how much of your content they are altering. If not much then could it cause your site to be ranked lower due to duplicated content? Just curious on this. I think there are tools that will look for plagarised content online
engtech
Why not use some free library to thesaurasize your product DB and then collect on those mechanical turk payouts yourself?

Bankrupt them. :)

noodle
you should've forced them to redirect always to the same product, if they were directly linking to products from the turk. that way, the person paying would be getting hundreds of one product description.
glasner
I'd make sure it's not one of your affiliates.
mkull
Thats a good point and I actually did look into that a bit ago. Not one of our affiliates at least, but maybe one of the competitor's.