In early 1998, Scientology started a campaign to get
Scientologist
s to put up web pages sharing their enthusiasm about Scientology. Scientology hoped to get 110,000 of these sites up by the end of May, 1998.
This is apparently an effort to clog Internet search engines. Scientology is really unhappy about the many, many web sites that criticize them and point out their illegal activities. They hope that, by getting lots and lots of pro-Scientology pages on the Internet, people will have a harder time finding critical sites.
Scientology put together a CD-ROM and an online form that
Scientologist
s could use to create their sites. Unfortunately, the result of this has been that these pro-Scientology sites are mind-numbingly similar. They are cookie-cutter sites: practically identical, with very little individual content.
This approach has made Scientology's campaign a failure:
-
it makes
Scientologist
s look like the least creative people in the world
-
it belies Scientology's "Think for yourself!" slogan
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it underlines how tiny Scientology's membership really is: even with these tools, there are only a few hundred pro-Scientology sites on the web
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it fails to accomplish their goal of tricking the search engines - since the sites are nearly identical, many search engines filter out the duplicate pages