Google bombs get dismantled

It used to be a joke around the Internet that if you Googled "miserable failure," the number-one result provided by the famed search engine was President George W. Bush's official biography on the White House's Web site. This was thanks to a "Google bomb" in which mischievous Web users would manipulate the page ranking of a search result by planting links on their Web sites that used the search terms to point to their result page of choice. But now Google has put out an announcement that states it will be "minimizing the impact" of Google bombs with a new algorithm designed to weed them out.

The reason? Some people misinterpret Google bombs as the work of pranksters at the search company itself rather than unaffiliated Web users. That isn't too good for publicity purposes; after all, some Google bombs were more malicious than your average political jab, like the anti-Semitic one that surfaced in 2004. So, while Google has said that it will not hand-remove Google bombs, that the newly-coded algorithm should take care of most of them.

Unfortunately, Google may not have had the success it wanted. Googling "miserable failure" now yields a bunch of results about the phenomenon of the Google bomb.



Related Links:

• Go back to category Internet & Networks to read more reviews and articles.
• Go back to Software Magazine's main page.