The Core

They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

Here’s what I did:

User lands on my page (referrer: google)
When they hit “back” button in Chrome, JS sends them to my copy of SERP
Click on any competitor takes them to my mirror of competitor’s site (noindex)
Now I generate heatmaps, scrollmaps, records screen interactions and typing.

• Google weakening their organic results to drive users into their own vertical offerings - hinting at strategic algorithm changes to demote whole verticals
• Maneuvering to prevent Bing reaching a useful critical mass of query volume
• Using data scraped from amazon to order its own product results