Some Northern Web sites have been snared in the lawless country of cyberspace as a springboard into the world of Bomis.com, a soft-porn peddling, dot com company.
Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Apr 20/01) - Northern Web sites have wound up on an Internet search engine peddling soft pornographic photographs complete with direct links from each Web page to its gallery of pictures.
Some Northern Web sites, including the Government of the Northwest Territories, and the Institute of Arctic Research of North America have landed on the site among a host of others and there's little they can do about it.
Bomis.com (pronounced like Thomas), a San Diego-based fledgling Internet search engine company, is currently scooping up Web sites throughout the Internet to build up its index.
In a phone interview from his office in San Diego, Cal, Jimmy Wales, chief executive officer of Bomis.com, said all Web sites added to his index are submitted by volunteers.
"Usually they're posted by somebody who lives in the area," said Wales.
All sites accessed through Bomis.com retain a Bomis.com toolbar with links to photographs of scantily clad models in various poses.
Wales compares his search engine to Yahoo.com and AskJeeves.com but targeting a specific market.
"Our target market is the Maxim (magazine) market," said Wales.
"Mostly men," he said.
Web surfers cruising other search engines browsing for information on the North could also stumble on a Bomis.com tagged Web site.
The University of Calgary-based Arctic Institute of North America appears in the search engine GoTo.com within the Bomis.com framework.
"It's annoying they stick (their tool bar) at the top," said Ross Goodwin, manager of information technology at the institute.
"It looks like its legitimate," said Goodwin on Bomis.com's tool bar appearing to be a part of the institute's site.
"All I can say is we have no control on who provides links," said Goodwin.
"They have our old URL," said John Boivin, Web writer for CBC North.
"It's a defunct location so it shows you how good of a site (Bomis.com) is," he said.
April Taylor, director of communications for the GNWT, said the Internet is too big to even attempt at managing who uses the government's Web site.
"Obviously we're concerned but we can't control who chooses to link with us," she said.
Taylor said the government could ask Bomis.com to remove them from the index.
"We usually like to authorize people who use us as a link," said Taylor.
For now Wales is riding pretty high on the Bomis.com train. The five-year-old company reaped over $1 million in profits last year according to Wales.
Bomis.com is an Internet Web ring. Sorted by topics, each link connects to the next eventually ending with the original link.
