Saturday, September 17th, 2005, 4:18 am
Googlebombing
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“Googlebombing” is the term used to describe a situation where inappropriate SERP‘s get returned due to intentional (hence unnatural) intervention with the Google algorithms. Anchor text of links (text in the vicinity of a hyperlink) gets heavily used for classification of pages and this observation can lead to overt misuse.
I can recall that in the past, due to large amount of poker-related spam, bloggers decided to link en masse to the Wikipedia page on poker, which in turn made it a prime search engine result for the term “poker”. Therein, poker and gambling were discouraged as well as the practices they use to promote themselves, destroying cyberspace in the process.
More recently, there has been a lot of talk about binding between the term “failure” and the White House, in particular George Bush’s official page. The voices of witnesses have grown loud enough to justify a post in the Google Blog.
If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I’d like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns…
My vague recollection tells me that several years ago, Google humour got involved when searching for the term “weapons of mass destruction”.
September 17th, 2005 at 7:41 am
Here’s the URL you were looking for:
http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
It was no. 1 for “weapons of mass destruction” for a short while, but has now fallen much down the list.
Wikipedia has a couple of good entries on the subject of Googlebombing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserable_failure
Mikkel
September 17th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
Interesting, Mikkel. I remember that at the time, fewer people were aware of how or why this could have happened. A friend of mine passed me an E-mail on the subject suggesting that “weapons of mass destruction” was in fact Google’s idea.