Good-bye, Google Bomb By Garance Franke-Ruta, Washington Post (Jul 23)
Goodbye Google Bomb 1.0 but hello Google Bomb version 2.0. Google did block the old and, as we see now, simple style of bomb where pranksters could game the ranking algorithms to have particular sites show in top results for searches on certain key words. The most famous of these was "miserable failure" bringing up the Whitehouse page for George W Bush. Google can spot these "swarms" and neutralize them.
But it is still possible to influence the results by overtly linking a politician's name to positive (or negative) news articles.
"As [Chris] Bowers explained it, "What I'm doing isn't a Google bomb." It's a much harder to detect effort "to alternately optimize John McCain" in the Google search engine rankings, by linking his name to nine mainstream new organizations's stories that raise questions about the GOP presidential contender."
Described in detail by Chris Bowers in ACTION: Searching for John McCain
Posted by Gwen at July 25, 2008 02:36 PM