The page, set up by a Blueyonder subscriber, uses the simple idea of taking the familiar web error page that displays when a file can not be found and tweaks it to say: "The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. The country might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your weapons inspectors mandate".
The page includes links to help the reader 'Detect weapons', which takes them to Amazon's UK site, and also opens a pop-up window for an online casino. Visitors can also link to another page where Weapons of Mass Destruction merchandise can be bought.
The research highlighted a sizeable jump in Blueyonder's UK audience, with 31% going to the WMD page in July. In Australia, where Blueyonder did not have an existing web presence, the effect is more pronounced -- a massive jump in audience and 90% of that audience being for the spoof error page. The WMD page also found readers in France, Germany and the US.
While the WMD spoof error is nothing new, Blueyonder found its audience boosted by the fact that it started to come top of 's searches when the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" was searched for.
Google and Blueyonder were not the only winners, however. The links on the site led to , which scored a high click-through rate. In the UK, 31% of visitors to the WMD site went to Amazon, and in Australia, the figure was 37%, which almost doubled Amazon.co.uk's audience in Australia.
Tom Ewing, European market analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings, said: "This is a fascinating net phenomenon. It really shows the power of viral marketing -- most of the hits came from Google after an email was circulated telling users to type the phrase into the search engine and hit the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button, which takes you to the top result automatically. It also shows the power of Google, of course, if it can generate this much traffic."
He added: "The Amazon aspect is what's really interesting. Because it implies that if you want to promote a site or product you can get massive click-through rates by coming up with satirical or joke pages like these."
The only question remaining is how did the site top Google's search charts in the first place?
"Google's engine works by identifying sites people are linking to," Ewing said. "And what happened here was that webloggers worldwide started linking to the site as an entertaining parody, which pushed its Google ranking higher and allowed it to become a phenomenon. If you want to get a high Google ranking, being noticed by weblogs is one way to do it. But as we can see from the US data, these kind of links spread very rapidly across the internet and peak within a week or two -- and they're always a very short-term web event."
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