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January 22, 2004

Nothing better to do

Googlewhacking was more fun.

Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point
By TOM McNICHOL

TIME was - say, two months ago - when typing the phrase "miserable failure" into the Google search box produced an unexpected result: the White House's official biography of President George W. Bush.

But now the president has a fight on his hands for the top ranking - from former President Jimmy Carter, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and the author-filmmaker Michael Moore.

The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through "Google bombing," or manipulating the Web's search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.

The perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link). The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site.

"I'm actually surprised how easy it was to do," said the mastermind of the Bush effort, George Johnston, 46, a computer programmer in Bellevue, Wash., who writes a liberal-leaning Web log called Old Fashioned Patriot (oldfashionedpatriot.blogspot.com). "It took about six weeks to get Bush's biography as the No. 1 result. I had no idea when I started that I'd get people all over the world involved."

Google bombing has quickly become an armchair sport among those who have a message to broadcast and perhaps a bit too much time on their hands. For nearly a year, the No. 1 search result on Google for the term "weapons of mass destruction" has been a satirical Web page made to resemble an error message that reads, "These Weapons of Mass Destruction Cannot Be Displayed."

The Liberty Round Table, a libertarian group, started a Google bomb that linked the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group, with the term "food Nazis." (As a follow-up, the group is trying to make the Internal Revenue Service site the No. 1 Google result for the term "organized crime.") Other recent Google bombs have sought to associate President Bush, Senator Clinton and Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, with various unprintable phrases.

Posted by P6 at January 22, 2004 10:17 AM
Trackback URL: http://www.niggerati.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/80
Comments

I think I'll have to jump into the "organized crime" one.

Posted by Phelps at January 22, 2004 12:55 PM

It's probably time to move on to something else now that Google bombing has become trendy.

Posted by Al-Muhajabah at January 22, 2004 02:09 PM