Just over two weeks ago, a Google or Bing search for the term "Quksace agjke" wouldn't have generated any results.
But as of late Wednesday, there were more than 3,300 hits for the nonsense phrase on Google and 145 on Bing. (Although search results on Bing state there are 5,000-plus pages found for the term, scrolling through the results reveals the lower figure.)
What caused the change?
An assignment given to Texas A&M graduate students in James Caverlee's course on information storage and retrieval.
Caverlee, an assistant professor in the computer science and engineering department, tasked students with developing a webpage that would create the most traffic on Google or Bing for the query Quksace agjke.
They've taken what they know about search engine optimization -- the process of bumping up the placement of a webpage in the search results list when entering a certain word or phrase-- and strategized ways to get their pages to the top of the ranks.
"We're trying to understand why pages are ranked the way they are," Caverlee said.
There are hundreds of ways a page can be moved up or down in ranking for search engine results, he said, and the game is constantly evolving.
For example, to decide the order pages will be listed for a particular search, Google considers factors such as how many times a word being searched shows up on the page, how many other pages link to it, the quality of content and how many clicks it gets on the results page, among other factors.
"One surprising fact is the homework went out on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday in class we were already seeing results," Caverlee said. "I've been impressed by the students' creativity."
Several students created blogs wherein the phrase Quksace agjke shows up repeatedly, many used part or all of the term in their domain name and some created social media pages using the made-up words.
By visiting http://quksace-agjke.net, Internet users will notice there's a new, fake Chinese restaurant in town, while at http://quksace agjke.wordpress.com, people can gain a sense of what Quksace agjke means to various individuals.
Many businesses hire search engine optimizers to route the most traffic to their company pages, Caverlee said.
His research focuses on how to discover and eliminate search engine spam, he said, adding that some search engine optimizers will use "unethical" means to get the most hits for their content.
Google has a quality control team on the look out for spammers, he said, but it's hard to catch everything when sifting through more than a billion pages.
"It's a classic arms race," Caverlee said of the battle between search engine quality control teams and content spammers manipulating search results. "People are always pushing the limit to try and find weak spots."
In his homework instructions, Caverlee outlined several rules students had to follow in keeping with ethical practices, including not linking anything via Wikipedia or posting their pages in online comment sections.
Thursday, the class of 45 students will look at the order their pages are ranked and discuss why that's likely the case.
Who knows -- maybe the link to this story will top the list.
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