Google bombing again

January 22, 2004

Google bombing is now turning the Web's leading search engine into a platform for political commentary.

The New York Times reports:

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 perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link).

The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site...

Some Google bombs may have been accomplished with as few as 20 links. What is important is not the number of links, but rather the popularity of the sites doing the linking and the relative obscurity of the search term.

A Google spokesman downplays the disruptive impact of Google bombing campaigns, saying that they only see it with "obscure queries" that make up a small fraction of the 200 million searches handled each day.

He's probably right on the latter point but there's empirical evidence that Google bombing can co-opt very popular phrases, too. For instance, as the Times notes, if you search for weapons of mass destruction, the top result is very likely this amusing satire.

Source: Seattle PI.com

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