Google Defuses Googlebombs

John C. Worsley writes "Google announced today a modification to their search algorithm that minimizes well-known googlebombing exploits. Searches on 'miserable failure' and their ilk no longer bring up political targets. The Google blogger writes: '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.'"

Re:Big changes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did a search for google, and the snippet that comes up under each google entry does not exist on the page itself, where does it actually come from?

It comes from googles' listings at dmoz.org

hahha

[fuo]

first thing i checked when i was this post was "french military victories"... then i noticed from the French-military-victories-still-works dept. glad i'm not the only one whose life wouldn't be complete without this little joke.

Re:Easier Solution

[shawn(at)fsu]

I use IFL lucky often. If you know enough about what your searching for it works nice. For example do an IFL search for "Astronomy Picture Day" and you'll go right to the Astronomy Picture of The Day website. Good if your on a forign machine and you odn't have your bookmarks.

Well...

[nweaver]

Santorum [google.com] still works.

Also "Miserable Failure" still works in MSN.

That info is from Froogle

[Animats]

That's coming from Froogle. Companies that sign up with Froogle or Google Checkout have some additional info about them. Try, say, Super Warehouse [superwarehouse.com], which Google describes as "Online retailer of color laser printers, laptops, hard drives, LCD monitors, and digital cameras". That text isn't from the "www.superwarehouse.com" web page, which starts out "Printers - Scanners - Toner - Monitors - Projectors & More at Super Warehouse".

Re:Big changes?

[Simetrical]

Are you saying that bots are getting different search results than users? Because absolute shitloads of websites serve different versions of their pages to google for a wide variety of reasons. For example some premium sites allow google to index part of their content in order to rope people into buying a subscription.

Yes, that's called "cloaking" and can get you delisted. BMW Germany's website got removed from Google [slashdot.org] a while back for doing it, and presumably less prominent ones regularly are as well. Google's official position [google.com] is that you should write a decent web page and they'll be able to figure out how it should rank:

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Re:The SCO search still works

[GigsVT]

No it doesn't. The links are all to sites about the googlebomb, not to sco.com. That's how he said this fix works, you search for the bomb and you find metadiscussion about the bomb, but the bomb itself no longer links to the target.

Re:Isn't this the entire methodology of Google?

[Simetrical]

I was under the impression that the link text was the entire means by which Google
created their PageRank algorithm.

Nope. It depends heavily on how many sites link to you, how highly rated those sites are, what they're about, etc. See the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org].

Re:Well...

[Shelrem]

The difference is that "Santorum" wasn't a Googlebomb in the first place (though I'm not trying to say that no one ever attempted a Googlebomb of it). It was a meme started by Dan Savage to make Rick Santorum infamous, and its popularity had nothing to do with PageRank.

Re:Big changes?

[dlanod]

To expand on this, PageRank is Google's algorithm's weighted democracy. GoogleBombing is the equivalent of someone stuffing the ballot box.