I read about this in the Guardian today…
Google have decided to put an end to the popular sport ‘ Googlebombing’. It’s incorporated into its search engine a Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow manages to identify and neutralise any concerted effort to skew search results for a word or phrase.
For those of you unfamiliar to ‘Googlebombing’, here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:
“A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intention.”
The interesting thing is that Google, a few years ago didn’t see ‘Googlebombing’ as their problem, but now they do.
We all like to think of Google as an honest search engine, we like to believe that “we the people” control what comes out of Google’s mouth. But in reality Google is a machine that’s been tweaked to do precisely what Google instructs it to do, even if that might mean filtering results to protect the company’s reputation. We don’t own Google, Google own Google.
I hope that they are honest and are just trying to maintain the chaotic interweb rather than try and control it…
This post is tagged google, googlebombing, Technical, Technology, Web stuff
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