Google Bombs: How Page Popularity Is Manipulated
In 2003, a group of pranksters decided to Google the term “miserable failure” and repeatedly click on links relating to George W. Bush so that any time people Googled this term, Bush’s pages were the first ones to show up because they were the most popular. This act of messing with Google’s algorithm is named a “Google bomb.” As we’ve learned in class, when you type something into Google, it’s a query, meaning you are asking for information from a database, and then Google provides a list of relevant documents. These pranksters must have boosted the authority scores of links relating to George W. Bush when they repeatedly clicked them in order to make them more relevant to their search.
During the 00’s, these kinds of jokes were edge cases, but today, “manipulating search results…seems more like an invasion than a joke” (Wickre). On October 1, after the massacre in Las Vegas, when people Googled the event, links from 4Chan and Facebook became popular and spread around conspiracy theories and false information. Because so many people were interested in the theories and fake news, they clicked on those links, which increased their popularity. As the authority scores of the links rose, so did the promulgation of misinformation.
Because we put so much trust into our phones, laptops, and tablets, it’s a huge disappointment when our information gets manipulated through these devices. Everyone uses the Internet for work, school, or enjoyment, which makes us all targets of political, financial, or “joke” hacking. In her article, Wickre calls for the formation of a Federation between tech companies to protect us from search result falsification. It would be beneficial for Google, for example, to come up with a way to check on what pages become relevant and popular from high authority scores to ensure these pages are not giving people misinformation or manipulating them in a fiscal or political manner.
Apparently, “it’s not unusual for security engineers from rival businesses to stay in touch when they see unusual behavior or patterns; they share the information” (Wickre). Even though the businesses have negative ties between them, they still have links pointing to each other because it’s necessary for them to communicate with one another when certain authority scores are high when they really shouldn’t be.
Wickre also suggests that Google and other search engines report to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites whenever an unusual search query seems to spike so that those sites can find out if there is a trend, as well. She also states “No single company, no matter how massive and wealthy, can hire its way out of a steady gusher of bad information or false and manipulative ads.” Even though Mark Zuckerberg is planning on increasing content tracking on Facebook, his efforts will not be enough to completely annihilate information manipulation. The future of information retrieval is unpredictable, and anyone has the ability to corrupt information and publicize it.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-bombs-are-our-new-normal/