by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 07, 2010

Fishing.com is a commercial web site for people who like to fish - at least, that's what they'd like you to believe. Their mission is "leading the world to water," according to the words under their logo, and they're so proud of the saying that they've even trademarked the phrase. But if you click around the web site, you'll discover its dirty secret. The site has almost no information about fishing whatsoever!

For example, they'll promise you fishing forums at the top of the page, but it's just a web interface for someone else's newsgroups - the various fishing newsgroups created on Usenet. And most of them aren't even popular newsgroups, so  they've long since been abandoned and they're now cluttered with unwanted spam. I thought this was a fluke, until I explored the rest of Fishing.com. And surprisingly, the other links delivered exactly the same experience.

Go ahead, try it - click on "Associations and Clubs," the first link at the left of the page. It takes you to the words "Category," and then the name of a long subdirectory -  in this case, Recreation/Outdoors/Fishing/Associations_and_Clubs. It doesn't actually list any clubs or associations for fishing - it just provides the name of the heading uncer which they might've fallen. Not only won't you find any club information on Fishing.com - you won't even find links to the clubs themselves. And that seems to be true for each of the 23 links other links down the site's left-hand side.  Topics like "Ice Fishing," "River Restoration" and "Spearfishing" all sound interesting and very specific. But when you click on the link, you get nothing. Just the name of a subdirectory where the information would've appeared.

"Maybe I'm not using the right bait," I said to myself - but I think I've figured out what's going on. Doing some research on the internet reveals what the web site used to look like. Back in 2007, the links used to pull up some information - though it looks like it was borrowed from someone else's directory. Clicking on the links at the left-hand side would pull up...more links. To fishing information located on other web sites - not Fishing.com.

It's even pretty obvious where they've stole their links from! (There's a site called "the open directory project," and I recognize the syntax.) You can view the open directory's fishing links at this URL. And if you crosscheck them against Fishing.com, you'll see all the same categories.

So does fishing.com have ANY information about fishing?  Sort of. There's 10 bullet points down the middle of the front page. It's just enough to make you think there's more information on the site - but don't get your hopes up. The rest of the web site is just links to other people's stuff elsewhere on the web. And most of those links don't even work.

But there's still ads from Google across the top, and more ads running down its right side. And the 14 links at the bottom of the page also seem suspiciously commercial. Two of them advertise hotels, but only in specific cities - Atlanta and Buenos Aires. And other links are simply to the names of foreign countries, like Uruguay, Cuba, and Guatemala, pointing to web sites offering classified ads - in a foreign language.

So what should web surfers do if they're fishing for useful information? If you reeled in Fishing.com - throw it back.

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