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Google Businesses The Internet

Google Defuses Googlebombs 169

Posted by kdawson from the French-military-victories-still-works dept.
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.'"
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Google Defuses Googlebombs More

Google Defuses Googlebombs

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  • Big changes? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:25PM (#17771142) Homepage Journal
    Surely this changes lots of things.

    If google is now discounting the wording other people use to link to a page, then isn't google themselves becoming like old fashioned engine, ie only specifically accounting for information on the actual page and not based on what other people who link to this page thinK?

    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.

    reworded becomes:

    By ignoring the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return only results which are from the actual page itself rather than looking at how other people link to each other.

    A googlebomb is not a bad thing, its making use of the algorithm to expand the keywords which a page is associated with.

    Sidenote:

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

    for example:

    Google
    The local version of this pre-eminent search engine, offering UK-specific pages as well as world results.
    www.google.co.uk/ - 4k - 24 Jan 2007 - Cached - Similar pages


    I thought google weren't meant to display a different page to bots as to users? (didn't they get in trouble for something similar not so long ago?)

    • Re:Big changes? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:30PM (#17771220)

      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

    • Well, I still think there was an legit problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hypermanng ( 155858 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:34PM (#17771272) Homepage
      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.

      • How they did it. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by goombah99 ( 560566 )
        I'm just guessing here but it seems to me that there was an easy way to implement this. Namely for any short search typed in, append the word "googlebomb". anything that has become a google bomb is likely to have sites discussing how the term has become a google bomb. Then they can give negative page ranks to any site pointed to from a site discussing "googlebombs".

        • Re:How they did it. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @03:03PM (#17774306)

          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: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by jlynd ( 1025333 )
            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.

            This raises an interesting idea about the exact nature of Google (and other search engines) and exactly the type of information they aid in providing. Are they providing the most relevant factual information? O

            • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

              by VirusEqualsVeryYes ( 981719 )

              Or are they providing the most relevant information according to the ever evolving "hive" mind that is the internet?

              But who determines what the most relevant information is?

              A shocking number of people here believe that Google should attempt to make decisions regarding what is and is not relevant. This is not the nature of the Internet. Until the telecom corporations win their multitiered internet, the Internet is "the people". Therefore, "the people" should decide what is and what is not relevant. If "the

          • 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.

            Googlebombs weren't about history.org linking to hilter.com with the text: "Fascist"... Googlebombs were about CuteKittenBlog.blogsyou.cx linking to a site, using the text "French Military Victories".

            It shouldn't be hard to automatically sort out which of those cases should be given weight, and which should not.

            But to speak to y

          • Probably because it was an orchestrated effort to manipulate the rankings for a certain search phrase? Ends and means...

    • Re:Big changes? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:39PM (#17771366) Homepage Journal

      If google is now discounting the wording other people use to link to a page, then isn't google themselves becoming like old fashioned engine, ie only specifically accounting for information on the actual page and not based on what other people who link to this page thinK?

      Not necessarily. It depends, like most other things, on how it is handled. The practice of googlebombing is the practice of mob rule and google quite sensibly worked to put a stop to it.

      A googlebomb is not a bad thing, its making use of the algorithm to expand the keywords which a page is associated with.

      A googlebomb IS a bad thing, it's a group of people with an agenda railroading the functionality of a resource upon which the health of the internet depends in a very real way. Again, it's mob rule; a certain segment of the population runs away with the whole idea.

      I thought google weren't meant to display a different page to bots as to users? (didn't they get in trouble for something similar not so long ago?)

      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.

      • Re:Big changes? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Simetrical ( 1047518 ) <Simetrical+sd@gmail.com> on Friday January 26, 2007 @01:04PM (#17771780) Homepage

        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.
        • My confusion was over LiquidCooled's sentence "I thought google weren't meant to display a different page to bots as to users?" That is precisely the opposite of what we are talking about here (other pages displaying a different page to googlebots as to other user agents.) I was only seeking clarification, I already know that practice is looked down upon.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by h2g2bob ( 948006 )
          Google doesn't serve different pages to bots - look at Google's cached version [google.com], or Yahoo's cached version [72.30.186.56]. The text is a feature added on their search results.
        • I hope this new algorithm will make that individual delisting unnecessary. I never really got the point, if you'd search for BMW dealers, you'd actually end up at the BMW website, which is what you probably wanted anyway. Also the delisting makes google seem some sort of online police, although they have no basis to do this, and I won't trust them to it.

          The power they do have is to create an algorithm that gives me back the kind of pages I was looking for. I will then use google and therefore look at thei

    • If google is now discounting the wording other people use to link to a page, then isn't google themselves becoming like old fashioned engine, ie only specifically accounting for information on the actual page and not based on what other people who link to this page thinK?

      I think it's more sophisticated than that, and I don't think Google plans to reveal more about how it works than necessary, so as to maintain their algorithm's "security by obscurity". Someone will figure it out eventually, but at least it

      • KISS (Score:3, Insightful)

        by nicklott ( 533496 )
        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: (Score:2)

          by darkain ( 749283 )
          Who needs a monkey? Just write a script that searches "googlebomb" for discussion pages on googlebombs, and automatically demote the sites mentioned. Why waste a good 15k?

    • 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? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @01:10PM (#17771914) Journal
      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.
      • I agree with you that there's no indication of the modification at all, however it's a pretty good guess that "ignoring the link structure" is what this effectively means. Every link can be viewed as being associated with a weight. When the weight is one the link is fully present, and when it's zero it's absent.

        Now we already know that google have the technical ability to ignore links, using their stupid nofollow tag idea that was publicized a few years back. The blog entry suggests the new idea had a pre

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Jerf ( 17166 )
          There's a world of difference between "ignoring link structure and becoming like the pre-Google search engines", which is what I was responding to, and "detecting Googlebombs and selectively ignoring the links", which is what both you and I think is going on. Had the OP made it sound more like the latter than the former, I never would have replied.

    • Re:Big changes? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LordKaT ( 619540 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @01:32PM (#17772328) Homepage Journal
      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.

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

        You know, I had an idea like that once. A long time ago. It was a "Jump to Conclusions" mod. You see, it would be this mod input that you would put on the bottom of each comment, and it would have different conclusions available in it that you could jump to.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by iabervon ( 1971 )
      They've most likely just changed how link text is used in calculations, not eliminated it entirely. For example, it would make sense measure pages for a search on multiple metrics: Is the page talking about what the search is asking about? Is it a respected authority on that topic? It makes sense to multiply these measures rather than adding them. So a page that scores 1/4 on each of these would beat a page that's 1% on one and 99% on the other.

  • miserable failure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TodMinuit ( 1026042 ) <todminuit AT gmail DOT com> on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:27PM (#17771164)
    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.

    • Please clarify (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Are you saying that page rank is a miserable failure [google.com] or not?

    • Re:miserable failure (Score:5, Insightful)

      by harmonica ( 29841 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:57PM (#17771682)
      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:miserable failure (Score:4, Interesting)

        by inviolet ( 797804 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMideasmatter.org> on Friday January 26, 2007 @01:57PM (#17772924) Journal

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

        I'm with you on this one, but it also makes me wonder...

        The purpose of link text is to impose additional, personal meaning on a link, like this: "Today in the news we learned about Windows monoculture [slashdot.org]". The "Windows monoculture" link text is my own meaning imposed on the link. Google is, or at least was, putting some trust in that imposition: Google would elevate that slashdot page's ranking under the category of "Windows monoculture", on the assumption that I'm probably not misrepresenting its content.

        A google-bombing can therefore occur without any conspiracy: if lots of people imagine themselves witty for jokingly linking the phrase "miserable failure" in their blog to www.whitehouse.gov, the result is an unintiontional google-bombing. And as other posters in this thread have pointed out, there is some truth value to that.

        Now we hear that Google is changing this, which means paying less attention to my link text, and instead devoting more computation towards analyzing what the target page is actually saying. I suppose Google is going to read the slashdot page I linked, and decide for itself what it's about rather than taking my word that it's about Windows monoculture. That's got to be computationally expensive.

        It's the same general problem as we see in academia with scholarly references. Let's say some guy writes a thesis and uses some other paper as a reference, claiming it lends support to the new theory. We can trust his citation (i.e. Google can trust the link text), or else we can mistrust him and go and dig up the reference text and read it ourself.

        Obviously that kind of mistrust is expensive (but isn't all mistrust?)... but after a certain amount of abuse, it's a price we have to pay in order to maintain the same degree of certainty. As for rethinking, they're doing this all the time at Google. They're constantly updating their ranking algorithms.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Breakfast Pants ( 323698 )
          No they wouldn't. If you look at the HTML of your post there is a rel="nofollow" attribute on your link, and every link posted in the comments of slashdot.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jpkunst ( 612360 )

            If you look at the HTML of your post there is a rel="nofollow" attribute on your link, and every link posted in the comments of slashdot.

            If I look at the HTML I see this:

            <a href="http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/ 26/1455224" title="slashdot.org">Windows monoculture</a>

            No rel="nofollow".

            JP

            • Your problem is you looked at the HTML. Heh, I was mistaken, it only happens on things like the website attached to a submitter's name in a story.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by kimvette ( 919543 )
        Fixing the google bomb problem should also help to fix search engine spam resulting from doorway pages and linkfarms. Ever search for a howto article and end up going to a page full of nonsense, then getting redirected to a product page, or even worse, a completely irrelevant page? If so, you have experienced a huge drawback to Google's algorithm which made it possible for blackhat SEO scumbags (such as Traffic Power/1P First Place, or whatever the hell those assholes are calling themselves today) to easil
    • The best solution IMHO would be to have each 2-3 results in the top 10 come from different search pattern algorithms. It would be substantially harder to corrupt multiple separate algorithms to "bomb" all the top placements, versus the same set of algorithms being applied to ALL the results (which effectively becomes 1 big algorthm and is easy to corrupt once you know how it works).
    • Do you think it's possible to come up with a system that isn't subject to abuse?
    • However, a search for "click here" still results in a long list of download pages for various plug-ins (acrobat, shockwave, quicktime, and so on) from all those webmasters that try to googlebomb Adobe and Apple with the "click here" phrase. Coincidentally, I searched for that phrase just a few days ago and it didn't look very different.

  • Easier Solution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by doroshjt ( 1044472 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:28PM (#17771180)
    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.

    • Re:Easier Solution (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dr. Eggman ( 932300 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:37PM (#17771324)
      I don't know, I've been pretty lucky with it.

      Needed a digital calender, IFLed, now I've got a Google Calender setup.
      Needed a new email service, IFLed, now I've got G-mail!
      Needed a homepage that would host my many RSS feeds, IFLed, now I've got a Google Homepage!
      Needed a desktop organizer, IFLed, now I've got Google Desktop!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by shawn(at)fsu ( 447153 )
      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by massysett ( 910130 )
      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.

      I read an article saying that Google focus grouped this issue. Most people don't even know what the button does, and hardly anybody uses it. But Google keeps it because they think it makes the front page more whimsical.
    • I use the I'm Feeling Lucky feature a lot - if you type a string of text into the Firefox location bar and hit the Enter key, it does an IFL search based on that text.

      I find it incredibly handy to be able to type in something like "youtube" or "bbc news" or even "wiki insert topic here" and have it automatically go to the correct page. Sometimes it doesn't take you where you might expect, but I'd say my overall success rate would be 95%+.

  • Finally (Score:4, Funny)

    by RyoShin ( 610051 ) <tukaro@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:29PM (#17771210) Homepage Journal
    I'm glad they took care of this horrible issue. You have no idea how hard it was for me to search for waffles [google.com] before this!

  • hahha (Score:3, Informative)

    by fuo ( 941897 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:33PM (#17771260)
    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.
  • I think Google has a bigger problem [userfriendly.org] than puny Googlebombs.
  • Now they just need to fix the part where I'm actually trying to find information on a product and all I get back is links to sites that want to sell me the product. I know where I'm going to buy it from...I am looking for information about whether I want to buy it or not.
  • ``Searches on 'miserable failure' and their ilk no longer bring up political targets.''

    And this is an improvement?!

  • Alternative Page to Link To (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fyoder ( 857358 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:37PM (#17771332) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • I feel a bit sad about this, since there was something wickedly fun about google bombs.

      I agree that it almost doesn't seem worth it to get rid of Google-bombing. Most of the effects were pretty harmless. Like you search of "miserable failure" and you get a political figure, or you search for "worst band ever" and you get Creed. Nobody is hurt by it. Oh, what, you're offended? The internet is often an offensive place. Get over it.

      What I find more worrisome is the manipulations of rankings for econom

  • I would guess that much of the fix is simply being a bit more self-aware in terms of ranking. If a page mentions 'google' 'googlebomb' and a short phrase in quotes, especially in close proximity, then there are two reasonable responses. One, weigh the page that claims a googlebomb a bit higher than other neutral mentions of that phrase, and two, reduce the weight of the phrase itself so it has a smaller effect when combined with other search terms. Extra points for a page that mentions multiple googlebo

  • Those were fun pranks, and Google themselves admitted that it doesn't really affect the quality of search results. I can't say I feel like thanking them for this improvement.

    • Google and racism (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jfengel ( 409917 )
      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 hi
      • Let's see... I'm not looking up these numbers at all, so I could be off.. but..

        Jews worldwide:
        6 million roughly in Israel
        8-10 million ? in the US
        maybe 1-2 million across europe
        possibly ? a couple million more spread across former soviet union, south america, middle east, etc

        so let's be generous and say 20--max 25--million jews worldwide?

        number of anti-semites? well, let's take the populations of egypt, iran, and palestinian territories. that's maybe...160 million? and let's say 20% of people in those countr

  • Well... (Score:4, Informative)

    by nweaver ( 113078 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @12:47PM (#17771502) Homepage
    Santorum [google.com] still works.

    Also "Miserable Failure" still works in MSN.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by VWJedi ( 972839 )

      Also "Miserable Failure" still works in MSN.

      You expected Google to fix MSN?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Shelrem ( 34273 )
      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.
    • Santorum [google.com] still works.

      The funny thing about that search, is that if you google santorum, then the description of the website that google posts is not taken from the website at all, but actually says it is a satirical site:

      Santorum
      Satirical attempt to name the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex after Senator Rick Santorum.

      Anyone know what that is about? Did Senator Santorum pressure google to make this change, or is there some less evil explaination?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kindbud ( 90044 )
      Looks to me like the new results for "santorum" do just what Google says, it links to sites discussing the Googlebomb, or to sites discussing the Senator. I don't see any links to fecal matter and lube.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AchiIIe ( 974900 )
      I have tried to imagine how the algorithm would be scalable *and* not be blacklist-based and for the life of it I can't. How would they be able to determine maliciousness from all honest linking? Unlike other google bombs santorum links to a site that is consistent, whereas miserable failure leads to a page unrelated to the search.

      I personally believe they really did make a manual blacklist of the googlebombs. I think that google bombs are useful too. a search for "Scientology" -> Still bings up xenu.net

  • Possible side-affect? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JayTech ( 935793 )
    The question that begs to be answered is, is it possible for this new algorithm to affect legitimate site rankings?
  • I did a google search on "miserable failure" and I got back links describing the "anti-googlebomb" algorithm and president Bush.

    So...did it work or not?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shani ( 1674 )
      Buried deep down in TFA (okay, in the first paragraph):

      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.

      So, yes, it worked.

  • Moo (Score:1)

    by Chacham ( 981 )
    Do you need a search warrant for a Google bomb?
  • I was under the impression that the link text was the entire means by which Google
    created their PageRank algorithm.

    Sure, it gets abused with GoogleBombing (although I can't say I really care) but
    if this changes, doesn't PageRank as a whole change in pretty radical ways?

    • If you think you know exactly how the PageRank algorithm works, you should really be making billions of dollars consulting with SEOs instead of posting on Slashdot.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Simetrical ( 1047518 )

      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].

  • Very annoying. It's a bit censorious of Google (once again).

    Two days ago typing in 'Liar' to Google and using 'I feel lucky' would bring you to the autobiography of Tony Blair. Not so anymore. A sad day.
  • Damn, they're right. Googling "Liar" no longer brings back Tony Blair as the top link.
  • http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=mise rable+failure&btnG=Search [google.com]

    still works for me.. the only thing I see consistently scanning down the search result is

    george bush!

    Still serving it's purpose...

  • French military victories (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gravesb ( 967413 ) on Friday January 26, 2007 @01:25PM (#17772214) Homepage
    Still works

  • Google broke my intarweb... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rthille ( 8526 ) <web-slashdotNO@SPAMrangat.org> on Friday January 26, 2007 @02:37PM (#17773802) Homepage Journal

    Searching for 'worst president ever' doesn't link to the whitehouse's biography of Bush anymore...

  • is spooking me a little. I've become conditioned to expect massive amounts of spin, yammering analysts, bloggers, a 2gb download, and yet more opportunities to get royally screwed in the form of updated EULAs, fancy licencing contracts, signing my life away for software rentals etc etc. No, Google just fix a *real* problem with their then they tell us. There has to be evil somewhere here, it can't be that simple. *dons tinfoil hat* and goes hunting snarks.
    • "I've become conditioned to expect massive amounts of spin, yammering analysts, bloggers, a 2gb download, and yet more opportunities to get royally screwed in the form of updated EULAs, fancy licencing contracts, signing my life away for software rentals etc etc"

      We're not playing World of Warcraft here ;)
    • And since google often displays the first image results even when doing web search, I can see Bush when doing web search too!
  • Thanks for modifying your search algorithm for political reasons. Your previous explanation said you did not interfere with this because it would be... *wrong* to modify your search algorithm for political reasons. (I won't give the link, because you took that explanation down when you flip-flopped).

    Now that you've demonstrated you will do this, how about removing references to Iraq and Body Bags. That just upsets people.

    Thanks
    Karl^H^H^H^H

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