Tuesday, January 10, 2006

A Day Older, A Bit Smarter

Imagine my surprise this morning, when I Googled the word "failure," and this site came up at the top of the list. Naturally, I was outraged, thinking that Google or some rogue little geek working there had manipulated data to make that site come up first. So, I posted a little entry here to express my outrage. I was quickly corrected by tugboatcapn, who introduced me to the concept of Google bombing. It seems that Google is being exploited by some net users to mount protests. The users have found a way to "bomb" Google to improve the rankings of particular web pages, and ensure a site is near the top of the results for particular search phrases. So, I was wrong. It is a BUNCH of rogue geeks on the Net who are manipulating Google to come up with those results. But you'd think Google could employ just one little geek to correct that flaw. Google no longer has the credibility with me that it once did.

1 comment:

The WordSmith from Nantucket said...

I first heard about google bombing about a month ago. I think I was listening to Dennis Prager and he was interviewing someone with a book out on Google.

I don't think Google is really blame-worthy on this "phenomena". It really is a great search engine.

Did you type in "miserable failure" or just "failure"? If you type in "failure", you'll get Michael Moore's website as the second top link. Apparently, conservative bloggers were trying to wage a counter-war by blogging "failure" in association to Michael Moore to get it ranked up there.