Other examples of Googlebombs: [talentless hack], [liar] for Tony Blair, [French military victories] who returns this top result.
Google's official reaction 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 it seems that Google received too many complaints to continue to ignore this problem and from now on we won't see too many Googlebombs, as Google updated their algorithms for these special cases. "By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead." That means we won't see too many famous Googlebombs (French military victories still works, but miserable failure doesn't work anymore).
It's very hard to guess someone's intention when linking to a site: maybe he wants to plant a Google bomb, maybe he was paid to include a text link ad, maybe someone spammed the site and placed links to his "pharmaceutical" sites, maybe he linked to a site and that site changed its topic, maybe that link was included in the template of the site or maybe he made a mistake when typing the URL. Google tries to discover unnatural links (for example, they aren't about the topic of the site) and reduces their effect.
Most likely, the new algorithm tries to guess if a query was Googlebombed and biases the search results toward pages that talk about the Googlebomb. But this won't work for new Googlebombs because no news site talks about them before they're actually effective, so I think we'll see more people trying to defeat Google's algorithm and place their Googlebomb in these restrictive conditions.
The simple mod to the algorithm would be dont rank pages that contain none of the google bombs keywords in its content top of the search results.
ReplyDeleteFor example the miserable failure example, neither word is on GWB's site, whereas the famous french victories site contains that term.
I still don't know why a company with Google's brainpower can't filter "viagra" from link sources to the point where googlebombs are rendered ineffective.
ReplyDeleteTypically we define a Googlebomb as pushing *someone else's* site to #1. So [french military victories] isn't a Googlebomb because that site *wants* to be #1 for the query.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens if someone uses this new googlebomb avoidance algorithm to cause their competitors' company name to turn up a search result that gives info on googlebombs instead of their competitor?
ReplyDeleteI like this definition from New Oxford American Dictionary:
ReplyDeletegoogle bombing n. the activity of designing Internet links that will bias search engine results so as to create an inaccurate impression of the search target.
The page from albinoblacksheep.com is not about French military victories, even though it contains these words. The person who planted the Google bomb could have used this page as well. So I think Google bombing is gathering a lot of links for a page artificially to propagate an idea using search results.