We Have Seen The End Of The Google Bomb
Ladies and gentlemen, a part of the history of this great country has passed, as the great Google Bomb passes into history. Last week, Google pushed out an algorithm update that defused most of the great Google Bombs, removing the fun practice of innacurately skewing search results from their search engine.
What is/was a Google Bomb? Wikipedia explains:
A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner.
We don’t know the specifics of the algorithm change introduced by Google, just that it ends some of the most famous Google Bombs and probably renders a book or two inaccurate. The George W. Bush/Miserable failure bomb is gone, and the evil martinlutherking.org website is no longer the number one result. Philipp has a list of Google Bombs, and how their status has changed over time. Interestingly, Google Blogoscoped now owns the top position for one of the old Bombs, since news coverage of a Bomb seems to be the legitimate replacement for the Bomb.
The most important thing: Dan James is still the President of the Internet. I’d hate to see our great leader fall.
Did Google make the right move? Of course they did. Google Bombs, while seemingly innocent fun, are an affront to the honesty Google claims for its search engine. If bloggers can game Google for a political statement, then why should anyone trust its search results to be objective?
[…] Google said in February that a change in its algorithm was going to ensure that Google bombing, the practice of mob linking to make a page unnaturally jump to the top of search results, would no longer be possible, but comedian Stephen Colbert is proving more powerful than the coders. Colbert, who does the nightly news satire show “The Colbert Report”, asked his readers to put him on top of search results for “Giant Brass Balls”. […]
Pingback by » Stephen Colbert Proves Google Bombing Still Exists » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel | April 23, 2007