Jan 29th, 2007
Googlebombs
Ever heard of a GoogleBomb? If you haven’t yet, you probably never will. And if you have, you won’t hear much of them anymore.
A GoogleBomb is the practice of linking an unflattering or slanderous phrase to a person’s name to make a statement. There are many examples of this, but the one that is the most popular and the one I was shown first was this: If you go to Google and type in “miserable failure” the very first result is (or was) a link to an official George Bush biography page from the white house website.
Google just recently announced that Googlebombs such as this one will now be eliminated by a new algorithm they have created. I can’t even fathom how they are able to do this, but it obviously worked. Now if you type in “miserable failure” there are a bunch of links that talk about George Bush’s page showing up #1 even though it doesn’t anymore.
It sounds like the sole reason Google did this is because there were people who thought that some of these Googlebombs were hand made by Google and reflected their official opinion of the matter. Instead of trying to fight this, Google just fixed the problem altogether.
There are still other ways to slander someone like that, but no more googlebombs.