Defused Googlebombs May Backfire

linguista submits for us today an article on the Guardian site, which theorizes Google's bomb defusing may backfire on the company. Article author Nicholas Carr calls out Google for tweaking search results based on the company public image. As he notes, the Google blog entry announcing the end to bombing didn't cite a desire for better queries as the reason behind the change. Instead "... we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception." While the general image of Google is still that it 'does no evil', it's worth noting that the search engine is not solely a link popularity contest. The results you get from Google are tweaked by a number of factors, and at the end of the day the company has complete control over what rises to the top.

Why is this a problem?

[oneiros27]

From the rant:

But last week, after years of taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward Googlebombing, Google decided to put an end to the popular sport. It incorporated into its search engine a Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow manages to identify and neutralise any concerted effort to skew search results for a word or phrase.

So um ... they changed pagerank so pages that actually contain a phrase are ranked higher than pages that don't contain the phrase?

Now, given that this originally was their strong point as compared to other search engines, and they picked up many more articles that were useful, yes, it might be a problem. However, you could also say that the simple fact that they used an algorithm that hadn't been gamed by all of the 'search engine optimized' as their real advantage, and there may be an advantage to changing it so that it's a moving target.

I mean, how awful would it be if we actually found the stuff we were looking for when we searched, rather than the search engine spam? If it gives worse results, then it's a problem ... but let's wait and see how it goes, and let the market sort things out.

OpenGoogle

[Doc Ruby]

Google should expose at least part of their ranking formula as a dead-simple GUI to control parameters to Google users. That way we can control our own "Google" rankings according to our own agendas. People could share their params with friends so we don't have to figure out what to do to be trustworthy, just which of our friends' searching techniques we trust. Just like in the real world.

Doing so would go a long way towards making it less necessary to trust Google. Eventually we would be best served by a totally open ranking client that searches multiple competing backend indices. But if Google handed us "trust web" to do it ourselves, they'd probably preempt that inevitable infomediation that would also disconnect them from the users, and thereby from their highest value relationship.

Re:Not specifically targetted

[UbuntuDupe]

Exactly. I'm tired of people jumping to the conclusion that Google used some crude, quickfix solution to googlebombs, like manually removing that particular bomb, or ending the use of links and pagerank. PLEASE -- give them just a teensy weensy bit of credit here. If you really think they just inserted those particular phrases (e.g., "miserable failure") directly into the search engine's code, then please -- try another Googlebomb. If the fix really was just for the known, existing googlebombs, you should have no problem stacking Google's results again. If you can't do that, then do us a favor, and shut the hell up until you know what you're talking about.

This article was shitty and banal.

[Lazerf4rt]

Here are a few shining turds from TFA:

The company is allowing concerns about its public image to influence the search results it dishes up.

Wow! What the hell motivation do you think Google was built on in the first place? The motivation was to achieve popularity, by being a good search engine. Yes, that's the "public image" they aimed for. So, what changed?

Let's not forget that Google's machine is not our machine. It's Google's, for better or worse.

OMG. Do you actually mean to tell me... I didn't invent Google?

Seriously, the entire lame article was just one big excuse to use the word "salubrious".

Autobiography

[benhocking]

You won't find the text 'miserable failure' in George Bush's biography.

You might - it depends on the author. ;)

However, you're correct that you won't find it in his autobiography.

Still - good point about the page actually containing the phrase that was being searched for.

"Yahoobombing" still works

[adnonsense]

See this Yahoobomb [yahoo.com], which faithfully links to the world's number one mostest miserable failure [whitehouse.gov] of all time.

Microsoft's search offering [live.com] (a Billbomb?) only comes up with Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore, at places two and seven respectively, with the rest of the results being links to stories about the Googlebomb as it pertains to that miserable failure [whitehouse.gov].