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.'"

miserable failure

[TodMinuit]

Searching for "miserable failure" now brings up a million pages talking about the Googlebomb, "miserable failure". Is that much better?

The whole reason PageRank was create was because the exsiting technologies at the time, namely keywords and before that meta tags, were being abused like hell. Now PageRank is being abused left and right. It's time to take a step back and rethink.

Easier Solution

[doroshjt]

Get ride of the I'm Feeling Lucky Button, the only time I've ever used this button is when some sends me an email saying I should search for Weapons of Mass Distruction and hit that button. haha fun, nothing found.

Well, I still think there was an legit problem

[hypermanng]

To some extent, googlebombs *were* abuse, which leads me to think Google needed to upgrade their heuristics. This appears to be much of what they've done, though I think their response was too focused on killing that specific form of abuse and not focused enough on improving analytic depth.

Alternative Page to Link To

[fyoder]

I feel a bit sad about this, since there was something wickedly fun about google bombs. But given that they subvert the intention of the search engine, it's completely understandable that they would take action against it. In fact, the surprise is that they took this long to do anything about it.

If you do the search, you'll find this page [about.com] already comes up on the first page. While it's not as clever as the original google bomb, linking 'miserable failure' to it would still express the intention of the link and could be an alternative to simply removing it.... Tough call, but something should be done with all those links, since now they are essentially 'broken' and constitute just a load more cruft in an increasingly crufty web.

Possible side-affect?

[JayTech]

The question that begs to be answered is, is it possible for this new algorithm to affect legitimate site rankings?

Google and racism

[jfengel]

In general I agree with you, though I'm aware of one instance in which it wasn't just a fun prank. For some time the search "Jews" came up with an anti-Semitic web page as its first hit, as a result of googlebombing by anti-Semitic groups.

Since there are more Jews than rabid anti-Semites in the world (I hope) I'd be tempted to just tell 'em to reverse-googlebomb, making sure you've got plenty of links to more valid pages, but a concerted (if distributed) effort to target one page is still going to put it higher up in the rankings than it really deserves to be.

Re:miserable failure

[harmonica]

Searching for "miserable failure" now brings up a million pages talking about the Googlebomb, "miserable failure". Is that much better?

Yes, it is. Because those seem to be the pages actually dealing with "miserable failure", different from the homepages of George Bush or Michael Moore (which were both victims of miserable failure Google bombs). If no other pages prominently feature "miserable failure", that's not the fault of the search engine. They can only find what's there.

Google bombs weren't a priority at Google precisely because the abuse was mostly done with irrelevant phrases like "miserable failure". You only search for those when you hear about Google bombs for the first time.

The whole reason PageRank was create was because the exsiting technologies at the time, namely keywords and before that meta tags, were being abused like hell. Now PageRank is being abused left and right. It's time to take a step back and rethink.

Google bombs don't have much to do with PageRank. They're about link text being abused.

As for rethinking, they're doing this all the time at Google. They're constantly updating their ranking algorithms.

Re:Big changes?

[Jerf]

With all due respect, a couple of sentences from Google are not enough to uniquely identify how they've changed their algorithms. Just because the only idea you could come up with is "ignoring link structure" doesn't mean that's what they went with. I'd expect that they came up with a way of characterizing Google-bombs and figured out how to discount that, which probably fixes some other SEO tricks too. I've got some guesses on how that could look, but none of them are informed enough to share, so I won't.

Re:Improvement?

[bky1701]

It's wrong, anyway. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox- a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs= g6p&q=failure&btnG=Search [google.com] see result 5, only one instance of the word on the page... yet somehow it is #5.

French military victories

[gravesb]

Still works

Re:Big changes?

[LordKaT]

I'd mod you down, but there's no "-1, Some Jackass Jumping To Conclusions"

Really now, stop it. There's no reason to believe, at all, that Google is ignoring link structure. Google probably sees a certain percentage of inbound links (with the exact same title) in a short period of time (say a week or two) and marks it as a potential Googlebomb.

Whoop-di-friggin-do. Yeah, it hurts shit like blog pranks, but it also fucks up spammers big time. Remember, a Googlebomb isn't just fun and games, it's also plenty of Viagra spam.

Meanwhile, the rest of us who work at getting high search rankings honestly have not been hurt. Amazing.

Re:Big changes?

[Artaxs]

Please stop referring to a Googlebomb as "mob rule."

PageRank Explained [google.com]
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

The Googlebomb is just an example of the weighted "democracy" that Page Rank is supposed to be all about. It is sad to see Google caving in to the whiners who email them without bothering to read their FAQ or their "About Us" pages.

And, as another poster said, these sorts of guerilla campaigns are wicked fun.

Re:Big changes?

[drinkypoo]

Please stop referring to a Googlebomb as "mob rule."

No. That's what it is. Why should I stop?

The Googlebomb is just an example of the weighted "democracy" that Page Rank is supposed to be all about

So is Mob Rule. That doesn't make it a good thing.

as another poster said, these sorts of guerilla campaigns are wicked fun.

So is using cars on the freeway as practice targets for your minigun. Fun is not the ultimate arbiter of what is right.

Re:Big changes?

[Anonymous Coward]

But democracy is just that, mob rule. What ever the majority of the mob wants, the mob gets. Google is maturing into a republic, the mob picks their representative (Google) to make the decisions for them.

Re:Big changes?

[sago007]

The Googlebomb is just an example of the weighted "democracy" that Page Rank is supposed to be all about

No, Page Rank is weighted democracy. A Googlebomb tries to destroy the Page Rank.

Page Rank is supposed to sort the pages according to there relevance, based on the links found on the Internet. A Googlebomb tries to prevent Page Rank from doing that by manipulating the links on the Internet. A Googlebomb does not mean that Internet users get more relevant results it is the other way around.

good vs bad bombs

[Anonymous Coward]

How is a googlebomb (defined as linking a 'bad' phrase with a hated object, therefore a negative act) different from a bunch of fanboys linking to their favorite FPS with the phrase "hottest thing ever", which presumbably doesn't appear on the web site for the video game? People are complaining that googlebombing is bad because it's a negative act, but it can be a totally positive linking system as well.

KISS

[nicklott]

This is Google, I think they've paid a monkey 15k a year to look for bombs and manually fix them in their index...

Re:Well, I still think there was an legit problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is my guess from which "googlebombs" still work and which don't. The google search engine has always used some combination of looking at the content of the page, and who links to that content. In the past it was possible to get a page highly ranked for a search term if there were many pages that used that term when linking to the page, regardless of whether the term appeared anywhere on the page or not.

If you look at which blog prank SOEs still work, they are ones where a bunch of blogs linked to pages specifically set up for the purpose of the googlebomb, and all contain the phrase in question. However, the ones that tried to raise the rank of an existing page that has nothing to do with the search terms are now defeated.

Therefore, it seems like they now are requiring the content page to have at least something to do with the search terms, in order for the links to count in it's pagerank. If this is what they did, it could also help with the annoying problem of a bunch of people linking to a dynamic page (today's news) for a certain story only to have that content that you searched for move off the page, while the bloglinks remain. If all websites setup their robots.txt files correctly or if bloggers always used the archive links, then this would not be an issue to begin with, but that is apparently asking too much.

Re:How they did it.

[timeOday]

To some extent, googlebombs *were* abuse

Well that's the question, isn't it? Why do you think they were abuse?

If people look up "facist," they should get Hitler or Stalin, even if those guys never called themselves that, and there's no precise definition. It's what people think about them.

Re:Big changes?

[philipgar]

actually, that would appear to be an anti-sco website titled litigious bastards. That really isn't a google bomb. If people are searching for litigious bastards, they're likely looking for that site entitled such, and that happens to be about the SCO case. That's almost like saying a search for slashdot returning "slashdot.org" is a google bomb. Google bombs generally involve a search phrase returning a page that isn't related to the phrase. i.e. "miserable failure" returning bush's biography. Bush's biography does not likely say he's a miserable failure etc. The changes seem to do what they were aiming for, sites related to a topic can still get returned, but not as many of the "random" sites that are linked to words that aren't used on the site.

If a link goes to a page, part of the ranking is likely given based on what percent of the page uses that phrase. I imagine it's a bit more complex then this, as often people link to pages that have no actual text on them (all images and/or flash for the intro), but the page should be indexed accordingly. Additionally they may take into account what percent of links say the same thing. Using clustering algorithms you could likely tell that for george w. bush's biography you have a bunch of link terms related to him, his life, presidents, policies, iraq, etc, and then you have the term miserable failure which is on the complete other side, and unrelated to the other terms. While I'm not expert on text mining algorithms, I know such algorithms exist, and they are likely used to stop some of the google abuse.

Phil