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What is the meaning of ESSIR?

Checking out if this year a European Summer School for Information Retrieval takes place a friend of mine found out something interesting: Searching for ESSIR, which is the abbreviation if the event, reveals that ESSIR is not only the IR summer school, but also the ad site “European Society for Sexual and Impotence Research” at essir.net

Note that this society actually does not exist, its just a hoax site with sponsored links. It belongs to Marchex Network, which claims to own more than 200.000 web sites and to reach 16% of the internet users. Check out the pages and you will find that there is virtually no information but only sponsored links. Due to the links in between the ad sites and the well chosen domain names (petshop.com etc.) they get ranked high. My recommendation: Pull the plug.