Ad non Sense. Net

Search engines such as Google are at war with a shadowy band of experts who make a fortune luring users to unwanted sites, writes Stewart Mitchell. You might reasonably think that when you search for a subject on the web using, say, Google, your results would be a round-up of the most relevant and informative sites. But you’d be wrong. A shady group of computer experts known collectively as “black hats” is trying to ambush your results in order to show you links to websites that have little to do with the search you had in mind.

Black hats, so-called because of the hats traditionally worn by Hollywood baddies, are responsible for an escalating cyber-war in which huge sums of money are at stake. If the black hats can divert you from the web page you would expect to land on to another in which they have a commercial interest, they take a fee. Multiply it by the millions of searches carried out every day and the rewards become clear. Black hats of the web make an e-killing - Personal Tech - Times Online