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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

What an excellent occasion to try the homoglyph hoax attack on friends and enemies! (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571984 .)

http://www.google.com/search?q=οraclе

Your search - οraclе - did not match any documents.

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Actually, you now get one page - this one. Isn't there some prize for doing a google search that nets only a single result?

Incidentally, these homoglyph attacks are pretty hard to catch. Even Vim (which normally chokes on 8+ bit characters in my setup) didn't seem to show anything different until I checked the hex codes.

>> Isn't there some prize for doing a google search that nets only a single result?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack

Hm. A search for "other" using that o and e shows that there are a lot of websites out there using this trick, presumably to mask their spamminess / plagiarism from Google.

Off topic here though.

It seems to be the o and the e at the end. Homoglyphs were a bad idea. Single letter or word homoglyphs in ohterwise latin text ought to be highlit somehow to warn against tricks like that.

i just set the default encoding of my browser to latin1 and disabled auto-detection. it doesn't work most of the time because the browser doesn't have to detect anything because of encoding tags in the page code, but it's handy if i have suspicions.

now i see gibberish for everything i don't care about, including utf8 homoglyphs.

How prescient:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/14/coincidence

Maybe it would work better with a <noindex> tag like this: οrасlе

http://www.google.com/search?q=οrасlе </noindex>

Update: Nope.

now it returns this comment on hacker news which explains that its a hoax, heh

Indeed, impressive on Google's part. There are surely dozens of other plausible homoglyphs that might work for a short time, though. Stay wary!

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