Two weeks or so ago I wrote about how an SEO mishap helped me catch a pedophile while Googling. Throughout the next few days I also caught a lot more people doing similar (albeit not the same) searches. In total I have sent out about 20 report-abuse e-mails to various U.S. based ISPs. 
Anyway, this mishap has made me think… why don’t the police utilize SEO to catch these fools?
Heck, the police could also catch people doing other weird stuff, like looking up how to build a bomb and the complete idiots guide to smoking weed, etc. All they would have to do is purchase a domain, set up some links to it, have an SEO set up some pages on there that rank highly for the phrases, and boom. Catch people doing it in the act, get the info on the user for that IP at that specific time (very few people out there know how to cloak IPs, by the way) and then get the info and check to see if they are doing something illegal.
I will admit that a few people are just stupid and jokingly search for sick stuff, but I have a feeling that 95% of the people who search for that stuff are actually serious about it and could cause some harm.
So, why don’t the police do this? Are are they already doing it?
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April 27th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Well I think the problem is this. If I decide to search for “insert disgusting criminal act here” ( Don’t want to get caught by the spam filters ) , that doesn’t mean I’m going to commit said act. Perhaps I’m curious, or want to learn more about it. Maybe i was the victim of said act, and I want to learn about what to do next.
The bottom line is this - just because someone performs the search, doesn’t mean they are a criminal. They haven’t actually committed a crime yet - and since we’re not in the Minority Report era, people can’t be arrested for crimes that they’re possibly *going* to commit.
April 27th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
I’ll be honest. And call me oblivious after saying this. But when somebody told me about something they heard on the news and this was a long time ago and you rarely heard of it and the internet was new, but they said there was some guy that did some thing to some kid.
I didn’t believe him because at the time I didn’t know that there were perverts out there that did these types of things. I thought I was getting my leg pulled.
They told me to do a search on (the name these freaks are called) Infoseek (at the time it was the best search engine) and I did. That was the first time I’ve ever heard of this. And the term P e d o was a new word for me.
So Leroy is right.
April 27th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
I realized I misspoke a bit, It wouldn’t work if they went after phrases like “How do nukes work” or “How rape works”, but it would work if they went for phrases like “free underaged porn sites” or “how to commit murder and get away with it” (which is pretty much the same phrase that gets many criminals in huge trouble during their legal battle, as funny as that sounds), phrases that you wouldn’t search for unless you were actually looking to break the law. It makes it even worse if the person went clicking around in the results for searches like that too.
I mean heck, if someone is searching for “free underaged porn sites” and they land on some innocent site and the webmaster (whether it is a person or the cops) picks up on it they should without a doubt report it to the ISP. All that’ll do is tell the ISP “hey, I suspect this fellow is abusing your system, set a flag and check up on their surfing habits” then if the person actually did commit a crime (by looking at underaged porn, for instance) the ISP can contact the authorities and let them know a crime occurred, the cops will go and get a search warrant for the person’s info from the ISP, the ISP will hand it over and that’ll be that.
I look at it this way, say you were walking down the street and you saw someone walking with a gun in hand and a smirk on their face, wouldn’t you make a mental note of them and call the cops? I sure as hell would. Now, why not contact the ISP if someone is searching for a phrase like “free pedo sites” and goes to your site? Both times it is the same thing - best guess.
My idea is why can’t the authorities set up optimized pages for those really bad phrases and report it to the ISP if they suspect the person is doing something naughty? Most ISPs would gladly spend 5 seconds of their time to run a quick query to see if the person did something bad.
April 28th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
The manpower to do that would be enormous. Sure would create a lot of jobs, that’s for sure.
But then you would get into the Laws according to the country the person lives in.
For example. Here in Canada it is not illegal to download music, porn, or yes, it’s true the bad stuff. It is illegal to upload it though. This is because the law states whatever Digital content you download is free for the taking, but if you upload the stuff and it’s illegal porn or copyrighted music, then you’re breaking the law.
I hope they don’t change it, but it’s unfortunate that the perverts are protected by that.
BUT! if they want to raid your home and find child porno then you’re busted! You can download it, but not be in possession of it. Weird ey’?