Which one do you use, Google.com or ɢoogle.com? Be careful about the capital G, which is not the same, as you have probably noticed because it makes a great difference. Namely, one new trickery has been added to a long list of such and similar scams most of us have encountered at some point. The fake search engine ɢoogle.com has been recently developed and, as some believe, its appearance may be just the beginning of even worse things.
Google Analytics traffic searches showed the fake Google as traffic from “secret.ɢoogle.com.” earlier this year, sometimes alongside “Vote for Trump!” message as the page title. According to Analytics Edge, “the group behind this domain had used it for “referral spam,” which is a term that describes the side-effect of somebody abusing a site’s resources or linking back in massive numbers.” Furthermore, the inventors of the Google faker managed to design it in a way that would “hide the true location of incoming links.”
Once you try to navigate to the address, you are redirected to what appear to be the lyrics to Pink Floyd’s song Money. On the web page itself there are also instructions on how to use it.
Russian spammer Vitaly Popov, who is behind this project, insists his scams are no crime, but only “creative marketing,” as he names them. This is not the first time he has used this technique to create fake sites. He has also created the ilovevitaly.com referral traffic which has caused numerous issues for webmasters and web owners.
Finally, this is how he managed to do it. What he used was the character Unicode 0262, a part of the expanded Unicode character set, a.k.a. “Latin Letter Small Capital G.” Thus, the web page looks similar to the original, but if you access it, you’ll immediately notice that that is not what you are searching for.
As we mentioned above, the Google faker has caused concern about the possibility of other spammers using the same method in creating clones of other websites. We hope there won’t be any major issues in the future, but, still, be careful!
Elie Chahine 