posted on Friday, January 26, 2007 8:26 AM
by
paul
Googlebombs
Google Kills Bush's Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.
Googlebombing is one of those things that everybody knows about, but just doesn't talk about or even want to know about.
Google will always tell you it's completely algorithmic, but a month ago I linked to Mike Hall's post about Beta Testers for Halo3 and within 48 hours he was at number 2 on Google and I was at 5. I got thousands of hits and emails for about three days and then noticed that Mike and I had vanished from Google's return for Halo3 Beta Testers. We didn't just drop in the ranking, we disappeared all together.
A quick word about Googlebombs