The Art Of The Google Bomb
10 Greatest Google Bombs of All Time
Over the past decades we as individuals have become increasingly dependent on google and other search engines to find everything from scholarly articles on topological invariant and their role in condensed matter physics to the newest Ken Bone or Harambe meme. Our increasing dependence on search engines has opened the door for many companies like google and yahoo to profit of modifying search results, and tailoring ads to specific searches. However, like many great technologies, someone somewhere figure out how to turn the wonder that is the modern search engine into a weapon, the “google bomb”.
Many of you may have heard of famous google bombs in the past, like a google search for miserable failure returning George W. Bush’s Wikipedia biography or a search for Rick Santorum returning something not quite fit to write in this blog post. But what exactly is a google bomb, and how do they work?
Basically google bombs take advantage of the PageRank system to artificially inflate the page rank of a given website, for any given search. For example in 2004 a number of individuals would link all sorts of pages with the keywords “miserable failure” to George Bush’s bio. This dramatically increased the PageRank value for George Bush’s bio even though his bio doesn’t actually contain the words miserable failure anywhere in it. Since PageRank is one of the key metrics google uses to return results George Bush’s bio rose to the top result spot for miserable failure overnight. In an attempt to remain somewhat politically impartial it should be mention that at the same time a google search for the word “waffle” would return John Kerry’s bio as the top result.
Unfortunately, like all good pranks the google bomb had to eventually come to an end. After seeing how the PageRank system could be manipulated google instituted measures to prevent the practice. Now all your google searches will be relevant, helpful, and boring. But next time your surfing the internet, just remember the lens through which we view the world is largely the result of mathematics, algorithms, and maybe just maybe someone else’s personal agenda.