January 22, 2004

Google Bombing

So if you enter "miserable failure" into Google you come up with George Bush's White House bio. Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point [nytimes.com]. They call this networked use of Web links "Google Bombing," since it takes a coordinated effort to influence the search engine's algorithms.

Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy. . . . The first Google bomb exploded in the fall of 1999, when a search for the term "more evil than Satan himself" returned Microsoft's home page as the first result.

miserable_failure.jpg

The only weird thing is that BBC reported on this fad nearly six weeks ago. What took The Times so long to catch up? And why haven't our conservative blog colleagues counter-attacked to place someone else in the #1 Google position for "miserable failure"?

 Posted by glenn

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