The first thing I did was to google "carrot top" and "$70 Million". And I found 320 pages mentioning both terms, but none of them actually associated him with the $70 Million. The guy just happens to be mentioned on a number of web pages which happen to contain the phrase "$70 Million".
And that's the "eureka". This site works its dubious and unreliable magic purely by algorithm. It's a computer program written to search the web for pages containing famous names, dollar signs, and numbers in the millions. It looks for multiple citations, hoping to eliminate some of the "noise" (it may also disregard pages with words like "house" or "contract" to weed out some flagrantly irrelevant hits). And since the name "Carrot Top" is on lots of pages which also include "$70 Million", that's how it tagged him (more evidence: Nikki Sixx googles "Nikki Sixx"' $40 Million"," Art Garfunkel googles "Art Garfunkel""$35 Million", and Mario Lopez, googles "mario lopez" "$9 Million").
The brief bios, likewise, are grabbed from elsewhere (I guffawed at the one for Yoko Ono, who's "a Japanese-American artist, musician and author, perhaps best known for her marriage to John Lennon", which was snarfed from this random blog comment). Likewise, the photos are all drawn from the first page of google image results.
This explains the weirdly bland nature of the site. There's no one home! Just a computer creating amusingly shitty content. But it's also terrifically enticing shitty content for those googling for what's essentially unfindable information (there's no legitimate resource listing the net worth of lots of movie stars, as that info isn't public knowledge). And, as Seth Godin pointed out in the comments to my first entry on this (link above), they've done a pretty fancy job of search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure maximal mileage from this scheme.
Very clever! Figure out something lots of people search for but which doesn't exist. And make it appear to exist in some slapdash manner, with no human effort. Even without the search engine tricks, because no one else out there can possibly be offering this info, you'll get the big traffic (and the big ad revenue).
The brief bios, likewise, are grabbed from elsewhere (I guffawed at the one for Yoko Ono, who's "a Japanese-American artist, musician and author, perhaps best known for her marriage to John Lennon", which was snarfed from this random blog comment). Likewise, the photos are all drawn from the first page of google image results.
This explains the weirdly bland nature of the site. There's no one home! Just a computer creating amusingly shitty content. But it's also terrifically enticing shitty content for those googling for what's essentially unfindable information (there's no legitimate resource listing the net worth of lots of movie stars, as that info isn't public knowledge). And, as Seth Godin pointed out in the comments to my first entry on this (link above), they've done a pretty fancy job of search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure maximal mileage from this scheme.
Very clever! Figure out something lots of people search for but which doesn't exist. And make it appear to exist in some slapdash manner, with no human effort. Even without the search engine tricks, because no one else out there can possibly be offering this info, you'll get the big traffic (and the big ad revenue).
