InsideGoogle

15-Year Old Kid Screws Up In Google Scam

A 15 (or 16?) year-old guy heard on Digg that you could get a stupid and fake article into Google News by writing a press release, so he wrote a silly article about him getting hired as Google’s youngest employee. In doing so, he sparked a media blitz, then got accused of malicious intent and of being a liar and perpetrating a hoax by many people, and put a spotlight on the practice of putting press releases in Google News.

Tom Vendetta from New Jersey, a sophomore, explains:

I was looking around on http://digg.com, and came across an interesting submission showing how to fool google’s news system. Me being the curious person I am, read the article and proceeded to try it. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I am the biggest google fanboy ever. I mean hell, I even dressed up as Larry Page (Google him for halloween. Wanting to fool a few friends, I submitted an article using the method that was provided. I entered my email ([removed]@gmail.com, go ahead spam it… my internet life is over anyway =’[ ). I never got any email from the news website, so I figured it never went through. I used all fake information and forgot about it. It wasnt until around 10:35 pm that I received an instant message from MAKEBot ( a bot that sends the latest digg posts ) what did I see? “Google Hires 15 year old”. At that moment, i felt my stomach knot up and my heart drop. I knew exactly what happened and knew that I would end up regretting posting that. I am now truley regretting it. My gmail account now has 130 unread email messages, as opposed to the 5 i normally get daily. My myspace has tons of friends requests, as opposed to the 3 i get monthly. This is all going out of control and I am regretting every bit of it.

I’ve submitted a stupid press release in the past, one where I “announced” that my site had reached top rankings on Google for such highly-sought-after terms like “nicollete sheridan naked”, “tweel tire flash”, “klimkewicz” and “multicameraframe?mode=”. I was making a commentary on other stupid press releases just like my own that were completely serious (yet useless), and were showing up in my RSS reader through Google News.

I think its ridiculous that a press release, which anyone can write and has no guarantee of accuracy, can appear in Google News. It is notoriously hard to get a legitimate, professionally produced news site in Google News (and even harder for blogs), and the idea that all of these releases get dumped in there, with no expectations of professional editing, is absurd.

This poor kid got screwed by making a joke he never thought would reach such proportions. He’s the victim of a stupid idea, but a stupid idea that should never have been posted on one of the most popular news sites on the internet.
(via Chris Gilmer)

The original press release read:

15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page.

(I-Newswire) - 15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant’s offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw’s in Google’s beta e-mail service, “Gmail”. Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student’s blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta’s expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.

Follow the story on Digg:
Google hires 15-year old kid
who is tom vendetta really?
Google doesn’t hire 15-year-old kid
Google Did NOT Hired Tom Vendetta
15 year old (not hired by Google) offers full apology

March 13th, 2006 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Google News, Search, General | 5 comments