ExperienceFestival.com

In trying to do my graduate quantum mechanics homework, I’ll Google a lot of obscure terms hoping to get insights. But something odd started happening this past week when the website experiencefestival.com (I’m not going to link to them, beware spyware if you visit it) started popping up on the first page of Google.

The search chiral dirac matrices returns experiencefestival.com as the 4th hit, with 7 or more sites within its domain. Most contain verbatim copies of Wikipedia entries.

I tried to search on this obscure website with an reasonable Google Page Rank of 5 (my own is 4). The only article I could find on it comes from the equally (or more so?) obscure “Hindu Website” that describes experiencefestival.com as “Pirates of the Internet.” Oddly enough the article is littered with scientology.org ads (is there a large Hindu to Scientology crossover?)

One more concern is that over 400 Wikipedia articles use experiencefestival.com as a reference. Not even expected articles, i.e. ones that deal with “Experience Festival,” but ones like Frank Zappa in popular culture, Basket toss and the band The Mars Volta. The person who added the reference to the latter page did added it with more mundane links to fill in references. I haven’t checked if the same user added each experiencefestival reference, but that might lead to something.

What’s really bad is that the Wikipedia reference for The Mars Volta article links to the experiencefestival.com site which in turn is just an “adaptation” of the Wikipedia entry. It’s a circular reference! (Note: I removed the ef reference from the Mars Volta, but you can see the old version here)

A WhoIs search of the domain reveals that the registrant lives in Stockholm, Sweden and gives religious and “enlightenment” labels for the site.

Hopefully this brings out some information on what this site is about. When I tried to visit their FAQ, Chrome popped up a phishing warning and AVG blocked a threat, so I’m very wary about searching around their main site on my personal computers.

It really looks like their ripping off Wikipedia content, getting references from Wikipedia to boost their page rank and then hoping to promote what? Spam and viruses? Enlightenment through coercion?

At least by posting this I can hopefully hear from others who are seeing this website pop up in their searches. My post on Foundation for a Better Life is still a top five on the Google search for the organization and gets a reasonable number of hits from curious searchers.