Googlebombing
A googlebomb is when a group of people get together trying to push a
site up the Google rankings… a site which seemingly doesn’t belong
there. To do that, they all use the same link text when linking to the
specific site – trying to make Google think the words in the link are
indeed relevant to the page.
Probably the most well-known “Googlebomb” was for the phrase
miserable failure. It would lead to the official biography of President
George W. Bush on the White House servers. The effect is particularly
convincing when you ask people to first enter miserable failure, and then
press the “I’m feeling lucky” button; they will be referred to the top
result directly, and some even thought Google expressed political
beliefs here. Of course that’s not true – Google only created the
algorithms that now run automatically, and from time to time, get
abused to discredit people or organizations. Google’s only editorial
decision in cases like these is to display small disclaimers close to
googlebombed search results, and educate people on what’s happening.
A reply posted to their official Google Blog1 was:
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.
But the failure bomb against George Bush (which was quickly receiving
a counter-googlebomb targeting director Michael Moore) wasn’t the
first one to appear on the search scene. Adam Mathes of the Über blog
is credited with the invention of the Googlebomb. In his blog on April
6, 2001, he wrote:
Today, uber readers, you have a chance to make history.
Or at least legitimize some new jargon I’m about to make
up.
Today’s jargon of the day is:
