[paxtonab]

I wonder if the point of the botnet is to get SERPs from Google? They stopped letting you know quite a bit of information about keyowrds, rankings, etc. a while ago.

Seems like there is lots of potential for blackhat SEO with this type of botnet.

[jastanton]

It's fairly easy to get serp just by spinning up some ec2 instances. You can make a good number of requests just by providing proper headers. That is, assuming the last guys using that ip didn't just do the same and get rate limited. All this to say this seems to be a lot of trouble just for SERP results.

[paxtonab]

I was also thinking that if competitors showed up in the results you could then use the botnet to then link bomb them?

I agree that it does seem like quite a bit of effort for an undetermined purpose though...

[Sujan]

Hm interesting, good point. Would have to check if the API returns the same results as the real search listings...