Look at this bizarre Google result. It is not because of personalization. You won’t find anything about the late Mr. Hitchens on the page. However, in the source you will find his name irrelevantly added as the “title” element of a link and as the “alt” text to several images. Why would the Yellow Pages people do this? Because, on the occasion of his recent and untimely demise, a lot of people began searching for his name on Google. So why not profit from his death?

Google has supposedly tweaked their algorithms to fight spam. It’s amazing how easy it still is to game their system.