Comments on: On Google: Is It Okay for Public Companies to Editorialize?

By: dedmond29

dedmond29 — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 17:42:29 +0000

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).

By: Todd Defren

Todd Defren — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:15:33 +0000

Fascinating. I swear ta God, that http://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?

By: Steve Turner

Steve Turner — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:10:05 +0000

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?
http://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.

By: Ike

Ike — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:06:30 +0000

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.