Lately my Google searches have led me, now and then, to weird articles that seem to have been machine-translated by software from three years ago.

I can't figure out exactly what is going on. Are they original articles whose authors wanted them to appear in English? One should have sympathy in that case; the dominance of my native tongue is sure to exert some pressure on writers who would like their pieces to be widely read but who can not write in English. But there is something oddly bad about the translations. The example I pick on here is from a (Canadian) French site, but the result reads like something automatically translated from Japanese through Croatian and from there to English. Some irony is added by the fact that the demonstration of realtime translation between French and English in the original Wave presentation was so much better.

Another possibility is that this is some form of spam exercise involving international plagiarism. But sometimes, as in this case, there is no advertising and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious money angle. Following the links that are randomly sprinkled among the nonsense starts to make it clear, more or less, what is going on. Each link is to another article somewhere on vox.com, or to another near-nonsense article that itself has links to an article on vox.com. The vox.com articles are just random strings of unrelated words and phrases; about half the words are links to pages on other sites that are themselves just links of lists to sites with some kind of real content.

In other words, this is some kind of pagerank manipulation scheme. More internet trash, and vox.com seems to be the main culprit. The final targets of the links are in some cases reputable outfits (such as the Mayo Clinic). Did they hire some sleazy “search engine optimization” outfit to help bump them up in Google’s rankings? I doubt that they are aware of the internet spam with which they are now indirectly associated.

The article I’m looking at now happens to be particularly rich with almost-nonsense phrases that have a certain beauty. I borrowed one for my title. Here are some more samples (it’s fun trying to guess what the original meaning was):

You can profit by it offline and hardly give up someone the bounce incorrect your messages when you throw down a relation.

Recently Google announced a immature quiescent output called Wave that has had the e-experts all of a oscillating.

If Wave has a design, it’s more a deliberation with friends than the brace. It’s a living hang-up.

As you throw down replies these probe up, loyal delay as a unmistakable deliberation. and if you throw down botched up on a complex deliberation you can replay it so it builds, entry-way on entry-way.

My at best difficulty is its closed species. It looks incredible.

Of send, in maxim, you could partake of an offline clone, but this loses the healthy interactive side. And there is no integration with olden days. Will it with on? I don’t recall.