It's about 20 years since the Guardian printed a picture of me under the headline Million Dollar Guy. I had won an award for a piece of software I'd created, DBXV, from the Million Dollar Software club to expose how easy it is to scoop sham awards.

Two decades on, Andy Brice has achieved much the same thing with a product that is at least as good as DBXV was and which has two features which DBXV never achieved. First, his AwardMeStars utility actually exists; and second, he didn't have to pay for the award plaque.

Software developer Brice, of Oryx Digital, has now won 16 awards for his latest product, AwardMeStars. Not just awards - recommendations from software download sites. "Some even emailed me messages of encouragement such as 'Great job, we're really impressed!," Brice reports.

They should be impressed. Brice's product is one of the few downloadable executables which definitely can't be infected with a virus - because it's not executable. It's a text file, which simply says that it's a text file which won't run - but it carries the .exe suffix, which means that your PC might try to run it if you click it.

Just to make it clear: it won't work. It doesn't work. It was created as an experiment to see how many shareware awards it could receive.

"The obvious explanation," says Brice, "is that some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them."

It's an ancient scam, one of many designed to fool search engines into giving a website a higher rating. The idea is that we, being lazy animals, will do a search for a product, and click on the first link that comes up. So if your pages are the highest rated, then yours will get the clicks - and the advertising revenue that flows from those clicks.

But of course the same applies to other areas where awards are common. How many people, seriously, do you think vote for Restaurant of the Year awards given by local newspapers? As any publisher will quickly confirm, such "prestige" awards are designed purely and simply to persuade the chef to buy advertising space in the paper (and an expensive table at the awards dinner).

In the case of DBXV and its award, all we had to do was write to the awards organiser and say: "We sold over $5,000,000 worth of DBXV," respond appropriately to their message of congratulations and stump up the £60-odd it costs to buy the aluminium plaque that says that Consoft (geddit?) won the award.

We pleaded pressure of work in refusing the invite to the the lavish black-tie dinner. In reality, both my collaborator and I were known to the award company and the cat would have emerged from the bag if we'd shown up. It didn't matter: the assurance of LD "Lazy Dog" Spencer (company secretary) that the figures were correct was all the proof they required before cashing our cheque.

In a similar spirit of inquiry I experimented by text voting for my nearest Greek taverna for an award from my local paper. To my complete lack of any surprise, it won; I can show you the picture of the elated staff at the black tie dinner. And I can show you the advertisement they took in the paper, too.

The good news: having submitted the "software" to all 1,033 shareware download sites listed by submit-everywhere.com Brice was pleased to find that 421 sites rejected it. The tragic news is that judgment was still pending on 394 sites, and actually accepted by 218 which list it, obviously, as untested.

Dismally, the rejections aren't all gold-star efforts: several of them rejected software "of this genre" - a utility.

Now, shall I tell you about my award-winning blog?

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