NY Times: Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point

[La_Serpiente]

Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point



TIME was - say, two months ago - when typing the phrase "miserable failure" into the Google search box produced an unexpected result: the White House's official biography of President George W. Bush.

But now the president has a fight on his hands for the top ranking - from former President Jimmy Carter, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and the author-filmmaker Michael Moore.

The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through "Google bombing," or manipulating the Web's search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.

The perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link). The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site.

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Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point

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[aquart]

1. Tee hee.

[Q3JR4]

2. .....

miserable failure

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. I have mine

:evilgrin:

[NewJeffCT]

4. Carter is gaining

So, I am kicking this up to the top...

[Mari333]

5. I wonder who BOUGHT the domain name??

http://www.miserablefailure.com/

[SaddenedDem]

8. Registered in April 2000

That's what you call advance planning!

[hippyleftist]

6. bush is a miserable failure

[Buns_of_Fire]

7. Interesting article...

Their final paragraph:

Clearly, anyone who goes through life trying to manipulate search engine results would have to be called a miserable failure. And how many of them can there be?

Now, if the NYT had any sense of humor, they would have hotlinked the words "miserable failure" to the correct site. After all, everyone with any sense knows there's only one real miserable failure in the US right now. Besides, I do not appreciate being referred to as a "miserable failure" simply because I rather like pointing out what a miserable failure Commander Codpiece is.

Hey, count your blessings, Karl. Instead of "miserable failure", it might have caught on that "steaming pile of rancid maggot puke" was the preferred link...

[SoCalDem]

11. steaming pile of rancid maggot puke....oooh I LIKE that one

:)

[Greyskye]

9. been doing my part

:evilgrin:

[LunaC]

10. Bumpety-bump

and a kick to the top....