On Google: Is It Okay for Public Companies to Editorialize?
My politics are best described as "socially moderate, fiscally conservative," which means I've been holding my nose since the 2000 elections... Still, I am first and foremost a patriotic American. I've tried to be careful, when discussing politics in front of my children, to remind them that I may be "against" the current Administration but I am still proud of America and its principles.
Which is why I was kinda' troubled to learn that a Google search on the word "failure" always points to the official page of The President of the United States of America.
I am a huge believer in the quotation, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" (attributed to Voltaire), and in this case I do not disapprove of the message, but the messenger. For a publicly-traded corporation to stealthily editorialize in this way does not seem appropriate. Bush may be a failure but he is still the President of the United States of America. You don't need to respect the man personally, but a public company ought to maintain some public respect for the office.
More importantly, for me this calls Google's vaunted PageRank system into question. Let's see what Google has to say about the integrity of its search results:
"Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult. And though we do run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank). A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search."
I find it hard to believe that the "failure" search result is "automatically" pointing to the President's personal webpage. Feels like a snarky bit of codeplay, to me.
Tags: google, president+bush, pagerank
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Comments
It's codeplay, and it's coordinated by kids outside of Google who think it's fun. see: Google-bombing)
That said, Google Inc. would be better served to manually adjust such skewed results. Not as a matter of censorship or political bias, but rather as a means to avoid the wrath of non-tech conservatives who might ASSUME editorial hanky-panky.
Appearances are everything, and Google should have done something about the most famous Google-Bomb by now.
Posted by: Ike | November 30, 2006 04:06 PM
As the above poster said, this situation has nothing directly to do with Google, but is a deliberately organized political effort -- if enough people link the word "failure" to the Bush page, that will up the result on the Google search (this is one of the ways Google's search index works).
But considering Google is reluctant to ever mess with their search algorithms, I don't believe they should change it. After all, this is hardly the only incident of Google bombing, and it would be very easy to imagine the view of Google if they fixed this one "error" and not the multitude of other examples of this, big or small. And they are unlikely to be able to fix, or even know about, every single example
And finally, I tried the search myself. There was this important text at the top, which I think solves the problem:
Why these results?
www.google.com/googleblog These results may seem politically slanted. Here's what happened.
That explains the situation, without requiring them to change their search design.
Posted by: Steve Turner | November 30, 2006 08:10 PM
Fascinating. I swear ta God, that www.google.com/googleblog text/link was NOT there earlier today!
I did not realize that this was a well known "exploit" of the Google system, my bad. I am happy to see the link that Steve has pointed out (and agree that "that is enough" of an explanation).
Interestingly, my 14-year-old son pointed this out to me. Maybe that should have been my first clue that this was a well-known fact? ;)
Posted by: Todd Defren | November 30, 2006 08:15 PM
The integrity link above points to the search engine's idea that technological innovation will ultimately alleviate the need for human intervention in search results - which may be a part of the reason that they have consistently taken market share from Yahoo and MSN.
Of course, the system's not perfect and the "failure" tactic is a classic example of this (using link text and link volume to manipulate search results).
Posted by: dedmond29 | December 1, 2006 12:42 PM