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LeapFish and Ben Behrouzi Spam Techcrunch. What’s new?

Trace Richardson — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:40:51 +0000

Ben Behrouzi has hit an all time low for himself and his new startup LeapFish in front of Silicon Valley and the world. After Techcrunch declared LeapFish as “another meta search engine no one will ever use” his employees were caught red handed making shill comments praising LeapFish and calling it “genius”. Classic. This puts him on the fast track to destroy yet another brand in addition to his past casualties, ePerks, Brabus Ventures, and iHype.

Now Techcrunch knows what the rest of us have known for years. Ben Behrouzi, LeapFish and most of Ben’s companies are spammers. I’ve personally received ePerks and LeapFish spam and or phone calls. A former ePerks employee confided in me that Behrouzi employees are given free reign to use whatever techniques are necessary to hit their numbers.

Former Ben Behrouzi ePerks employee that wished to remain unnamed:

I graduated from USC, I never imagined I would be spamming for a living.

TechCrunch points out the obvious that LeapFish provides no real value to searchers. LeapFish claims to be the “first multi-dimensional information aggregator and search portal in the world”. In reality it is simply a search engine aggregator similar to DogPile (launched in 1996), Addict-o-Matic, or the hundreds of others that exist.

Bens’ Fake TechCrunch Comments are a Thing of Beauty

After one shill comment after another, it becomes clear that most of the comments are simply fake and obviously made by Ben Behrouzi and or his employees.

When we pointed out that spamming blog comments is a Ben Behrouzi / DotNext Inc. / LeapFish hallmark, TechCrunch confirmed that in fact, all of the comments were coming the same IP address. This IP address was later banned.

Ben Threatens BrokerScience and Others Yet Again….

Also for the record you and your readers should know that, the trace richardson and lord matt commenting above are rogue bloggers looking for attention, traffic and destruction of others. They are motivated by a disgustingly shameful agenda that clearly manifests itself in their comments above and have a long history of stalking our people and spreading fabricated news in mass quantities. The company will be addressing each of their malicious activities soon. – Ben Behrouzi, CEO Dotnext, Inc. LeapFish

Welcome to Ben’s World of Fail:

Techcrunch Writer, Robin Wauters Finally Bans One of The IP Addresses:

Feedburner Testing Real Estate Blogging Groups

Trace Richardson — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:41:49 +0000

I just noticed BrokerScience articles coming up in an odd looking feed along with articles from Inman and Bloodhound, among others. I traced feed to this non working domain (update: it is now working) indicates it is the future home of a Feedburner “ Real Estate and Mortgage Blogging Group“. TechCrunch reported testing on feedburner blogging groups over a year and a half ago, so perhaps there is a roll out coming soon or perhaps just more testing. Although it’s hard to tell, this does not look like a user generated group, but if that’s the case, we will follow up.

Oddly enough a google search for “feedburner blogging groups” only returns the real estate and mortgage blogging group mentioned above.

UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this story, the above domain in question, was working and is down again. It looks like the Real Estate and Blogging Group is official. Unfortunately it looks like BrokerScience is not included in the final blogroll.

UPDATE 2: Link is down again….. testing it is. Here is a link for the google cache.

UPDATE 3: Dan Green confirmed this is a group he created but as of yet, creating groups is not a feature available to the public.

Google Inches Towards Real Estate Search

Trace Richardson — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:51:18 +0000

Google has added a real estate filter to Google Maps, enabling searchers to look for listings directly via Google. This means that users can not only search for listings directly from Google, but also look at homes and surrounding neighborhood using Google’s Street View.

While this is not a game changer in and of itself, due to the lack of data Google has to work with in showing listings, it is yet another stark warning to the major players in real estate search that Google can step in at any point in time change the world of real estate search as we know it. Once the data problem is solved and Google makes a serious commitment to throw its hat in the ring, there is little that the major players in real estate search today will be able to do stop the intense erosion in market share that will inevitably occur virtually overnight.

At this point this is Google’s world and we just live in it, so if your business model relies purely on search or data aggregation, your model can be rendered meaningless overnight if you cross paths with the big G. The only consolation to the existing real estate search players is that Google is already very busy with other projects and its non-stop push to scale globally.

Google PageRank Update and Slow Google Reader and Search Times

Trace Richardson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:02:36 +0000

Google PR (PageRank) updates are under way. Oddly enough, the update seems to be affecting Google Search and Google Reader….. I’ve had problems loading and updating Google Reader all morning and I’ve had up to 30 second delays in loading the Google home page….. very odd, but comes with the territory I guess.

PageRank Forumla = PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

PageRank is often misunderstood like all things SEO and SEM related. To keep things complicated, read this primer. To keep things simple, PageRank uses a logarithmic scale and is based primarily on incoming links. In plain speak, this means that if PR were on a point scale and moving from PR1 to PR2 took “10 Points”, then moving moving from PR2 to PR3 might take “200 points” and moving from PR3 to PR4 might take “1500 Points” and moving from PR4 to PR5 might take “9500 points”. I think you get the idea, while my points system is just nonsense I’ve made up, the point is that each move upwards in PR becomes exponentially harder.

What does PageRank mean to you? Well for starters, PageRank does not guarantee high search engine rankings. PR is more of a qualitative measure of a site, but does not translate into directly higher rankings, although there is no reason why a site with high PR shouldn’t rank well also.

Well it’s perfectly normal to get excited as you watch your PR grow. The truth is that I’ve had sites that I’ve put no effort in building links to become PR4. While PR5 is definitely respectable, I think PR6 is a real accomplishment and requires a real sustained effort, most blogs will never become a PR6.

At the end of the day you can NEVER go wrong focusing on publishing high quality content that others find useful. If you do, people will link to you, you will rank well and eventually your PR will follow. PR is a lagging indicator, so don’t put the horse in front of the cart!