Slashdot Mirror
Google Juice
mpawlo writes: "I guess it is time to start using them bookmarks again, since favourite search engine Google seems to be on the verge of Altavista doom and search engine chaos. BBC News reports of Google bombing (often referred to as 'Google juice' by the infamous Crackmonkey subscribers). 'The users have found a way to "bomb" Google to improve the rankings of particular webpages, and ensure a site is near the top of the results for particular search phrases.'
There is also the sport of Google Whacking affecting your search results."
Step 2: "autistic paraplegic donkey porn"
Step 3: I'm feeling lucky
Step 4: Google Whack
SPORT??? Since when was THAT a sport??? That's disgusting!
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I've never had to force any search engine to do my bidding. The domain for my site is pretty unique so it is really easy to search on. One word pretty much brings up everything on the site.
On the other hand, if you're a business looking to get some traffic to your site a search engine can be a great place to start. Especially a popular one like google. I would be very tempted to do the same thing to get my sites near the top if they weren't already there.
Come on... Why the hell can't we ever have nice things???
:-)
Well, Google is great, but it was just a matter of time before someone decided it was time to F6ck with it...
DocChaos -------- I may be crazy, but then again I may be crazy.
I sent Google a link about sex and Javascript. I was searching for Javascript debuggers and got something ELSE. Here is a link to the old picture. http://www.devspace.com/Articles/Article_2002_01_2 1.html
However I think they are starting to do something since doing this search again yields proper results.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Google going under would be a true tragedy. It is the last true "search engine" and if it was gone, in addition to the loss of its damn good searching tech, the net would be set back a year at least without a viable way of searching it.
From innocent beginnings spring odd results. I first saw the talentless hack example months ago. Interesting that it's made the the rounds and been used other ways.
No sooner than someone finds a googlewhack and posts it, Google indexes that page and then there are two results.
"The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
Of course, as I'm all of the top three Stephen Turners already, I don't need to do this. :-)
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
You can make some sites to point to the good one,
but very good sites are links in hundreds of
places. This only works with very weird titles.
OverLord
But google whacking DOES NOT affect your search results - the whole idea of google whacking is to find terms that don't occur on google and stick them on a web page (which removes them from the pool since once google indexes your page the terms will be in google's database). Because you are only dealing with a single occurence of obscure terms this will have no effect on serious search results at all - unlike google bombing which can affect the order of results.
How can google whacking affect the results of searches? Oh no, the purity of my search for "orangeade sentient" will be ruined! (If this comment gets posted to a google searchable page, that will be a googlewackable phrase for a brief period of time. You don't even need the quotes.)
The users have found a way to "bomb" Google to improve the rankings of particular webpages, and ensure a site is near the top of the results for particular search phrases.
Well, yes, but it's not easy. The article describes several dozen to several hundred bloggers working together to drive a certain word or phrase toward a certain URL. In other words, it takes a large, concerted effort to deceive Google's engine, and this fact alone provides reassurance that Google is working according to plan.
Somewhere else, on this site, Scientology has been accused of using their large network of sites and members to do the same thing, driving searches for "Scientology" and related words to their own sites rather than those of debunkers. Again, this takes a large and concerted effort, which is a virtue of Google rather than a vice.
Is Google on the verge of breaking because such a thing is possible? Of course not. But there are people powering the search engine on the back end, making improvements constantly in response to issues like this. And their cross-linking approach to ranking pages, while not perfect, remains the most reliable way yet found to judge a match's relevance.
If it works correctly 99% of the time, and Google is constantly working on the last 1%, that still makes it better than anything else out there.
What they are reporting as a problem may not be. Google is raising sites in the rankings if large numbers of bloggers link to them--but they only do that if they like the link for some reason. What we have are lots of individuals (who many people respect at least enough to read occasionally) all saying, in effect, I find this interesting, and you might too.
We don't have some advertising hack sitting behind a desk on Madison Ave. saying "Make it so" and pushing a site to the top of Google. The only ways X-10 or mulesex.com or whatever could benifit from this are 1) as a joke, or 2) because they posted something that a wide variety of people liked.
This is how Google is supposed to work. So, where's the problem?
-- MarkusQ
before I start using bookmarks as religiously as I had done before... Besides, the Google team seems to respond to new ideas (good or bad) like white blood cells responding to an infection... Companies have been attempting to boost their rankings on Google for years... yet, for the most part, they have been unsuccessful. I doubt seriously that this is by chance...
You can't simply go to www.google.com/bomb and drag a slider to move a URL up the listings. You have to actually have a concentrated effort. They talk about getting a webpage such as Geocities and getting your friends to do the same. It seems to me mass posting to bulletin boards would do the trick, unfortunately. There is even marketing software out there which posts your 'press releases' to hundreds of bulletin boards automatically.
1. slashdot.org
.ORG than .NET .NEt than .COM
2. slashdot.jp
3. www.slashdot.net
4. apple.slashdot.org
That means ----->
1. More links to
2. Topic 168 isn't the unique Japanese Slashdot
3. More links to
4. Apple Roolz?
If this really does start to get out of control, Google will adjust their techniques to work around the problem. I hope.
Google only value page A's vote for page B
if page A itself is highly ranked. So if some
site (IP block) is found (either by human or
clever AI) guilty of blogging, then its rank can be lowered or set to 0 permanently.
jpenguin AT the google email service
1. slashdot.org/...
2. www.sux.com/...
etc.
Slashdot Sux?
Seriously, I don't know how I'd ever find anything without Google. I'm one of those people who think the usefulness of Google is part of what lowered the outrageous prices of domain names. Well, that and the tanking economy, I guess.
;)
Anyway, could Google add something like Slashdot's moderation system? Not only would sites be ranked as they currently are, but users could rate whether or not those rankings made sense.
Furthermore, users could also rate which users tended to give fair ratings. This would be a way to prevent a business from ubermodding their own web site.
I even seem to faintly remember Google bringing up the idea also. Wasn't this discussed before?
Of course, I shudder to think of the new heights karma-whoring could reach, on the new Google.
Adam
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
Perhaps the best solution, if things get too far out of hand, is to use the input of people who would be pissed off about crappy listings. That is to say, give users a free user account which could be used to give input on whats crap and whats not, then the Google admins could simply remove all the crap that rose to the top because enough users clicked a link that said, "This is crap!" Using this in conjunction with google's already strong engine would probably solve any problems, imho.
RFC1925
Ok, google isn't completely run by computers. There is at least 1 person running everything as well. THe article claims that there are several hundred people doing this. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out who is doing it, and wouldn't take more than a week at worst for a person working at google to research this, figure out who is making the 'bomb' pages, and block them from google's searching.
Of course, this isn't a permanent solution, but one employee employed full time could pretty much keep track of these sort of things by doing searches all day and seeing if things come up that shouldn't, and figuring out why, and then blocking the site.
I hope this post makes sense...it's damn early in the morning.
//FIXME: Bad
Google has always seemed to be driven by a happy medium of civic duty and profit. Take their text ads - I love them - unobstrusive, get the point across, and NOT in teh main search results - they are clearly marked. So I expect that the geniuses @ Google will attack this problem and come up with a solution. SO yelling about Google's demise seems VERY premature.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
As you can see, it's not that hard to spam the web with links to your site. Don't even count automated newsgroup posting, whch all gets indexed because of google groups.
If you, and some of the other guys, get together with your girlfriends and have the girlfriends google whack. See who does it the fastest, with the best result. You can assign a point system and bet on the results! You can even form teams!
Best Slashdot Co
Click here or here.
Not our precious Google! Looks like the search for alternatives may be even more vital. Does anyone know if the method discussed in the article would work with search engines using recently discussed technology? In either case, the search goes on for a more utopic search engine.
You are receiving this message because your browser supports Slashdot Sigs and you have Slashdot Sigs enabled.
perhaps it's time to even improve Google's search engine. On this this website there are some ideas on webselforganisation, it's quite interesting. Then, if a group of people link to each other, a search engine could point to the most distinctive groups.
Cheers!
They should correct those anoyance and not let it take any proportion. Someone said that if so, it could be the end of "true" search engine. Well, my opinion however is that they effectively need to correct those, but if they ever let it go, someone else (read another "true" search engine) will come in. I've always used Google since ~2 years because I was sick of all the other SE returning me so much crap. I do a lot of search on many subject and I have no objection to switch to any other SE if it evers works better then Google. They are my favorite for now, i am an happy "consumer". They are in business and should really remember what makes them so popular. By the way, another one wich I really like is http://www.codehound.com, you can search by programming language. Sometimes, it is a good supplement to goolge. At least for those who need to search about programming language... -- Is a sig. not in the sig. box still a sig.?
I'd rather be sailing...
The majority of websites that google catalogues are websites created by individuals, sites that tend to endorse the same types of social relationships that people hold in the offline world... albiet with even more emphasis on purveyors of porn and bizarre photographs.
That said, is it any wonder that bombing websites are out there and screwing up the search engines? They are just like the telemarketers of the real world. An insignificant handful of individuals when quantity concerened, tainting the reputation of a beautiful system of communication.
This isn't really an exploit, it's human societal nature, not erally an exploit whatsoever.
If the whole world thinks Britney Spears sucks, than the world will reflect that. if the Net thinks she's a "donkey spinning retard" than that will be what Google gives you when you search for her.
Big deal. I wish some journalists and Slashdot wouldn't jump to conclusions. Google rules.
Oh, great, now someone's going to set up a bunch of web sites containing that 9MB "words" file and get them spidered by Google! More noise in the search engine results... It'll all end in tears I tell you!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I read all this stuff a couple of days ago, following links from this Panopticon Story. Slashdot, read thyself.
Information wants to be $1.98/lb.
In addition to other spam prevention methods, google uses complex matrix/vector filtering to ignore link circles. Basically, if (say) the same 100 different sites link to the same set of 20 other sites, and no one else links to them, Google will map them out and realize that they are all working in a concerted effort. That way if a spammer sets up 100 ostensibly independent sites and then links them all to his e-commerce sites, google will realize what he is doing and penalize his rankings for it. The only way that a spammer can 'bomb' google is if he gets a large array of other sites (for instance weblogs) that have significant traffic and link to other, different sites, as well as the ones that the spammer is trying to promote. The long-and-short of it is that a group of bloggers could bomb google with a large effort, but the average spammer would have to set up an incredibly complex web of interwoven pages that garner significant traffic to fool google. Even if large groups of spammers formed a cabal to promote their varied interests, it would likely be discovered by humans working at google. So, I'd put away that violin.
give users a free user account which could be used to give input on whats crap and whats not...
;)
This is still prone to the same kind of spamming that everything else is. I'm wondering, if such a system were implemented, if you could just tell which sites are spammy by how much they're voted for.
If some site gets 100,000 votes one day, its probably crap
Trouble is, when the spammers find out your doing this, and start causing it to seem like their competitors are spamming....
*sigh*
I need caffeine
From my own experience, a properly worded search + feeling lucky is about 90% accurate in finding what I'm looking for.
Taken from: http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
What?
then a site that has many links to other sites that all have the same owner can be moderated appropriately.
The folks at Google have always proven to be extreemly innovative. They will find a solution to the problem that nobody else has even considered...
Two points - If hundred of blog sites have put this up, then the chance is that if you are seraching for a term then the blog thing is actually what you are looking for. Also, I expect that this will only last until it gets to the top of the list and then the pages get replaces and it all goes away
Sig is taking a break!
Here is the Corante article.
Oh, thanks BBC for ruining the fun we webloggers try to have.
Anyway, it's time to start our own bombs.. repeat after me..
Idiot - troll forum - Evil empire - gay pr0n
mogorific carpentry experiments
If a bunch of people get together and decide something is important, then through that community effort it becomes important. Google is our Global Brain. The best solution is for all of use to speak our voice on on a blog. That way google's results better match with what is important to us as a community.
-----
Virtual Personalities, inc. Verbots.com - start the dialog(sm).
This works best on presently unclaimed keyphrases. If enough people on the net decide that "evil empire" points to one particular place and link it as such, why shouldn't Google respond with that link when asked what the net thinks "evil empire" is?
As for commercial cross-site linking, isn't this roughly the net equivalent of building a bigger building on main street to get more attention?
In short, what's the big deal?
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Ah, but the thing to do then would be to add the Googlewhack phrase to your home page, thus taking it out of play. The universe of possible hits would then decrease over time, increasing the challenge...
sPh
Imagine you're the patriarch of a clan, and everyone in your clan has a homepage. All of your descendants' home pages have links to your home page, since you're the head dude. Your home page only has one word on it - say it's 'thrombosis'. Since Google bases the relevance of its search results on how many links there are to any page, any search for 'thrombosis' will likely show your home page as the number one search result, because you've got the word on your web page and dozens of links to your home page on other sites.
Once you think about how Google's rankings work, you can easily figure out how to game the system. That's why Dave Winer (token head of all webloggers) is usually the first result of a search on 'Dave'.
As far as googlewhacking is concerned, it's not as easy as it looks. Try 'parrhesia verboten'. I stopped once I found that one, proving to myself that it can be done. :)
A while back a friend and I put together a script to randomly search for 2 words and generate statistics on number of matches, here are our results.
This phenomenon is known as a "heisenwhack", after famed theorist Werner Heisenberg. A heisenwhack compensator has been developed, however. Adding the term "-googlewhack" to your search will fairly reliably eliminate these kind of hits.
You have most likely inadvertently taken advantage of Slashdot to boost yourself up in the rankings. Merely being an active commentor puts your homepage link all over ... And loads of people link to slashdot. It isn't on the same scale as the blog tactic in the story, but it still can jack a "Matt Burke" (or any other non-famous name) to the top in about 50 posts.
Mmmm...Google my precious...musn't let the nasty bloggers get it, no, not my Google precious, no...
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
There will *always* be a cycical contest between hackers and security, and search engine spammers and opitmizers are no exception.
It should be emphasized that these spamming vulnerabilities of search engines are almost entirely due to their automated nature. Efforts to present search results not just based on author-presented data, such as the frequency, positioning, and proximity of search terms, but with also somehow computing more objective data based on the source domain of the indexed file, how often searchers choose the link, and especially a sophisticated type of citation analysis that charts authoritative pages and hubs by counting the number of links pointing to a page, do hold promise for offering more relevant search results (Brin & Page, 1998; Chakrabarti, et. al., 1999; Notess, 1999). It is reasonable to assume, however, that no matter how sophisticated the spamming countermeasures adopted by automated indexes become, new ways of fooling the machines could be crafted. Some amount of human editorial power therefore seems necessary.
- From a paper I wrote back when Google seemed impervious to spamming (early 1999).
Given just the example regarding the redirection of "talentless hack" to the guy's friends site clearly demonstrates that this is an abuse and degrades the value of Google as a search engine, versus being some sort of great democratic benefit. When I use Google to find search results, I'm looking based on content and relevance, not "How many online friends got together and Google bombed". Online, with manipulable systems like that, democracy doesn't work, and that was the whole problem with META tags which this is basically recreating. Even worse is that it doesn't even just have to be democracy: Many Blogger sites themselves have high rankings as a whole, and with some machination someone can individually set up thousands of sites and programmatically set-up Google bombs. Clearly Google will have to filter this out.
Google is like scientific measurements : If the process is affected by the measurement then it's tainted.
Funny thing. Search for "Google" at MSN, google.com is the first site listed but only because it is a MS internet keyword. The first returned site is... http://search.msn.com
Yes, I think they fudged those results.. Maybe MS thinks you mistyped Google and really meant to type MSN. Search for MSN on Google and http://search.msn.com is the first returned.
I dont't use Lycos and after messing around there today I remember why. Too many moving things, flash crap flying across the screen. Why would someone use this place on a regular basis?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
There is a great short article about how Google works Here
It explains how Google rotates its index in a process known as the Google Dance.
Google already filters the link so that multiple links from the same sight don't drive up the link count. Someone trying to get people to set-up Geocities account that link to their sight would most like distribute a html file with instructions on how to use it as a Geocities homepage. It would be a simple (though compute intensive) task to do a diff against current pages that link to a sight before adding a new page. If it is exactly (or nearly exactly) the same, it doesn't get added.
Summed up, only add unique pages from unique sites.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It used to be, you needed deep pockets and/or a high-profile publication to effectively publicize your ideas. Now, a couple hundred like-minded people with no budget can do it. That's good! Maybe the BBC is sour about it, but that's the kind of social change some of us have been hoping the Internet would bring.
Some one should write some software with a database of anoying websites, which do stuff like this. The would prevent the browser from going there. It could be distributed, and users could contribute to 'the list' (the only examples I can think of are warez/pr0n sites that lead nowhere - not that I know about that sort of stuff).
"schizophrenogenic waltz"
It ends up being someone whose last name is Waltz. Does that count among the elite googlewhackers?
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
This does _nothing_ to undermind the relevance of Google's rankings. When you perform a search on Google and the first "hit" is one that has been juiced in this way you are getting a hit that a larger number of individual sites, all of which are respected by other sites, agree is important to the subject. That is the beauty of Google.
Yes, this effect can be choreographed, but the result is the same. All of the sites choreographed to achieve this result are voting that site A is relevant to subject B. If the sites involved consistently show bad judgment their ranking in Google are likely to decline and therefore their contribution to the Google ranking for subject B will lessen.
The fact that a large number of highly ranked blogs can drive a URL up the Google pop-chart is evidence of both the respect blogs are given and the power of Google's algorithms to find such non-corporate backed content.
This trick was well known among SE users for at least 6 months now. Many people took advantage of it, especiall adult websites.
I tend to be looking for specific information. For a simple topic search I tend to use Yahoo!. Since I am looking for specific information when using Google, it is nothing for me to have to look through 5 to 10 pages of results before I find a site with the information I need. If someone is looking at a site based on the fact that it is near the top of the list, then they are a fool and deserve to be mislead by Google bombing.
Smeghead every day of the week.
A few months back, I did a Google search for "javascript string manipulation", and was rewarded with a dozen hits all along the lines of:
"Hot Teen Javascript String Manipulation"
"Live XXX Javascript String Manipulation"
"Upskirt Javascript String Manipulation"
"Sizzling Javascript String Manipulation"
etc. They were all using some sort of cgi to generate the links. It took Google a month or so to remove them.
Thought it might be a prelude to something like this.
Personally, I care very little about the bloggers bombing certain keywords. They likely have something to say on the topic. The thing I fear is the stupid sex sites, online casinos, and mlm scams diluting my search results.
All I wanted was a rock to wind a piece of string around, and I ended up with the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota
All of the input, lets call them downvotes, (no upvotes allowed with this sorry) is simply a suggestion which is viewed by the google administration
Are you sure this would scale? There are three billion items in Google's index.
(background info: the origin of the term downvotes. Are you now calling E2's system "organized whining"?)
Will I retire or break 10K?
The value of a search engine lies in its ability to return usable results when you are actually looking for something. Most of the "exploits" people are discussing don't affect Google's usefulness as a search engine. (When is the last time you searched for "talentless hack" or, for that matter, "david gallagher"? Only someone already participating in the prank, or curious about it, would even know it existed.) And "Googlewhacking" is the most harmless of all - the only search results it can "affect" are its own, as listed winning word pairs lose their uniqueness at the next crawl. So what?
Google folks are not stupid. If the integrity of searches that people really make is affected, they will change the code.
In the meantime, is it really necessary to squelch every last bit of fun on the Net?
My sig at another site, which contains "Reunite Gondwanaland", is the third link returned from google. And the fourth link, too.
Best Slashdot Co
It's a little depressing that even a well-designed search engine like Google, with its complex algorithms, _still_ cannot do what the veriest simpleton can do at a glance, which is to tell if a printed page treats with a subject of interest or not. It's also significant that Google, in its attempt to imitate this very basic human faculty, resorts to tricks that nobody _ever_ has to do when quickly evaluating a webpage (e.g. chasing links.)
hyacinthus.
But it fails to mention the "dumb motherfucker" -> George Bush search hit perpetrated by the Hugh Disk site. It helped expose the potential flaw in Google's ranking algorithm.
I'm a bit surprised that when people picked up on this six months later it's considered clever and original.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
And what's the optimal ratio of praise to links? (I take it that positive text on the page next to the link is helpful?) Should we offer space in each others' sigs? Can we bargain that space for agreements to mod each other up when possible?
Satan, lead the way!
____
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
This has been going on since 97. There are sites where all you do is download the current list of other sites, and add your link to the list. the result... tens of thousands of links pointing to you! Old trick. What it boils down to, is one search engine alone isn't that great. No matter how good it is, it will be cracked. Theres just too much money in search positioning. The best solution I know od is using something like http://mujen.com
There's no need to manually Google Whack anymore.
:: Imagine There's No Windows. It's Easy If You Try.
Check out this project on Freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/googlewhacker/
MONOLINUX
Let me get this straight. A large number of people who run webpages that some people read for some reason, all link to a source because they think its good. Then google assumes it's good. Isn't this more or less how things are supposed to work? If my and a bunch of my friends think Joe's webpage is a good place to find out about a talentless hack, great. Ok, Google is getting manipulated a bit, but I still don't think we have a serious problem.
I believe we should start referring to him as "THE Jon Katz". THE, of course, stands for Talentless Hack Emeritus.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
If you have cable, take a moment to flip to MTV (aka the Flashy, Shiny Thing Network). Anyway, look at what's actually on the screen. There's always something moving / flashing / pulsing or whatever. They never keep a camera angle for more than, say, 15 seconds. The talking heads keep yapping about nothing.
If people watch and grow accustomed to that kind of thing, then their attention span probably will drop to something just short of a goldfish. Now, try looking at the layout of any of the more popular sites. You've got different departments competing with each other for your clicks, so they do what they must. If it has to flash / fly / cry out "click me!" so be it. They're drowning. At any rate, take a look at the serene simplicity that is google. It's dead by comparison. Where are all the flashy, attention-keeping buttons / banners / ads? They don't need them. They're focused on one thing: providing a service to the world, and turning a nice profit while they're at it.
Well, that was a nice incoherent rant.
Michael C. Hollinger
Not an entirely horrible idea :)
... oh wait it already works :)
Just think Slashdot Effect + Google Bombs. A Google Nuke?
Other ideas:
Corporate Gluttons -> RIAA
Monopolist -> Microsoft
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Amazing magic tricks
If you type "Free Porn", then you can whack your google all you want!
A warning to those considering using Google's page ranking service (which tracks your surfing habits, which isn't a problem since it is very upfront about it.) Overall, it works pretty well and it has found several pages of genuine interest to me that I would not have found otherwise. Also, I have no reason to think that they're doing anthing sinister with the information (and I don't care.)
However, since I like slashdot so much (I assume that is why) it's been serving up advertisements for other projects that link to SourceForge whenever I run google searches; for example, the white supremacist publication the Free Occident, which is powered by SourceForge.
Now, I'm not one of those people who thinks Google should try and filter hate speech from search results. Likewise, I don't think that the Free Occident should somehow be prevented from using SourceForge's software - open source means open, Voltaire was right, etc. However, I think google should draw the line at serving advertisements for articles about how "If you hear about a 100-million-dollar swindle, then you know that it has to be a Jew."
I've dumped a copy of the html for the search result in my journal - paste the Extrans into an html file to see it in close-to original format. It appears from the first version in my journal that the ad appears ABOVE the search results - this is not the case.
Free Occident is a web log, but I find it far more worrisome that they've purchased an ad on google than if they were trying to blog some search term, like "White Power," or even "Occident."
Yes, I'm Jewish.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
You type Hot Grits Portman ?
Slashdot doesn't even come out in the top 5. Someone is slacking out there, and only you know who you are.
Maybe this has already been mentioned, but...
It wouldn't be too hard, or too inconcievable, for some enterprising advertising agency to make personal contact with a wide array of bloggers and offer to support their blogging habbit in return for one or two links a week. They wouldn't need to be featured heavily on the weblog site (it could be a small sidebar link) and a company that contracted with the weblog advertising network could enjoy high google rankings for a steady monthly fee.
This would be the online equivalent to what is currently known as "gorilla" or "viral" marketing. It doesn't have anything to do with outlook and vbs files though. Essentailly, it amounts to paying an agency to get you the two most valuable things in the marketing world: "street cred" and word-of-mouth.
Pepsi recently had an incredible success with their "Code Red" Mountain Dew product. They generated high sales with almost no mass media support by employing a series of viral marketing agencies in urban areas. They basically hired a bunch of kids to hang out, drink soda and talk it up. It worked.
Online gorilla marketing would be expensive (say $5000 a week for 1000 links), but that's very little compared to running a series of large print ads nationwide. And the results would be worth it: high search engine rankings, plus "word of mouth" links.
The truth is that online advertising and marketing now rely on either tired old crap that doesn't really work (e.g. spam) or incredibly immature -- as in not yet developed -- techniques (click-throughs and such). As web searches and e-commerce become more and more the de facto way of finding and purchasing goods and services, look for more intellegent marketing strategies like this as well as smart datamining and true one-to-one promotions to dominate the future of advertising.
There may come a time when the very idea of launching a hugely expensive mass-market promotion starring a soon-to-be-played-out pop icon will be a laughable marketing scheme...
Howard Dean for president
perambulatory menthol
interferometry fandango
trivet spectrometry
And another which only hit two word lists:
lugubrious interferometry
And the best of all... antares trichinosis - NO HITS!
I'm so 3l33t3!!!!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
As long as Google continues to get free publicity from Slashdot, I can't imagine it being dethroned.
Seriously though I fail to see a problem here. Yeah, I read the links and checked out a couple of so called "Google bombs". It certainly didn't convince me that Google was flawed in any way. Even if it did indicate a gaping hole in Google's algorithms, Google recognizes blogs. Didn't they announce just a few months ago that they were starting to crawl blogs daily to stay up-to-date? If this really became an issue, it would be a simple matter of "talentless hack -blog" to remedy it.
The worst abuses I've seen is where many entires that come back in a search are redirects to some common site (Example: at one time, searching for 'discount airline tickets' brought back many links, the majority of which were redirects to priceline.com, even though the domain name had nothing apparent to do with priceline.com (another reason, beyond the pathetic Shatner ads, to hate them). If they just refused to index pages with redirects, one massive source of abuse goes away.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
to set up a network of blogs that would negotiate. then you make the link appear on a random subset of those.
The internet taught me one thing that I think I refused to beleive prior. That is: If there is a way to benefit, even slightly, even though many will be harmed, someone will be willing to do it.
Mod the Parent up +1 Funny he just cannot be serious
Seeing as this is a story about Google Bombing this is actually on topic
Evil abusive, Monopoly
Tech News from people who know how to use a spellchecker
Learn aboutScientology
Join in its lots of fun
www.office-supplies-st0res.com/ (66.33.85.157)
office-storage.1nf0-office-equip.
pens-pencil.search-office-supplies
buy-furniture.furniture-sh0p-searc
printer-toner.supplies-1nfo-office
office-product.office-supplies-sh0
office-computers.supplies-1nfo-of
calculators.supplies-1nfo-office.
discount-office.supplies-1nfo-off
If you look at the HTML source code (after clicking on one of these results from google.com), you can see it is obviously a deliberate measure to track it's referring URL and search keyword, and logs the results to bizrate.com. Stuff like this makes me furious, especially if you take into account the potential long-term costs. Google's spider has to waste traffic by going through these sites, searchers like me have to skip through a bunch of garbage results, resulting in more traffic. Sure, maybe a few kilobytes of data, but IMO, it contributes to the expenditures of search engines, eventually resulting in more ads, etc... Maybe i'm exaggerating a tad, but it's wasteful to say the least.
Another more interesting series of links about google bombing Corante.com article on google bombing and another one here focused on weblogs influence on the rankings (cause they are indexed every day (or multiple times) and newer/fresher page views/links are weighted higher in the google algo.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
yggdrasil tendonitis - returned 1 result!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Why not simply check who registered the domain. If the same person/people regestered the domains, then that should only count as one link.
.5 + .25) 1.75. It makes it much more dificult for a page to get higher rankings.
You could even go further, how about lowering the "value" of a link the more often it appears...so, for example where as 3 links to the same page might be worth (1 +
I'm sure they can write a few lines of code to do this and once it's integrated, sites will try another way to get higher ratings...but it only serves to make it a better system. This also serves the purpose of keeping companies that link to divisions from inadvertently increasing there rankings.
Ok lets have some polls about how users feel about various things, say microsoft, linux, mozilla etc. And then if the results are what malda likes we should use the raw number of slashdot readers to make it so on google. Like say, we all bomb operating system so that linux becomes the first one to show up... or even better, it comes up for inovation and computer. Same with mozilla. And Microsoft we can bomb it to come up as satan. Hell if we play our cards right, Microsoft won't come up at all... and if it does it'll be surrounded in little geocities sites and nobody reads those anymore.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I was just sitting here reading the Googlewhacking link, when my new mail pops up with the whatis.com word of the day. That word -- Googlewhacking.
Is this some sort of cosmological conspiracy?
Which makes me wonder, do you get more Googlewhacking cred by using alliteration?
Seems to me this is easily abused, especially considering m$ influence, and the source for IE not being open.
Therefore Mozilla really needs to have this feature added to Googlebar to level the field.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Hell, one of my friends has a moderately successful company, www.rawhideinc.com that will "google juice" your company as one of their services. They are still around after a couple years so they must be getting clients.
1) Google is the company with the highest number of Phd graduates. I'm sure they can find an algorithm to cancel out this affect
2) Whenever you do a search, unless it is very specific, you automatically know not to trust the first couple results. It's a fact with all search engines. What makes google even better is that it shows you the text that links to it. So you can tell if it is a relevant link or not.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Yeah, yeah, while the second part of this post (google whacking) is quite clever, how come that Slashdot now is featuring also news for skript kiddiez like google-bombing?
Thank you shlashdot, now every common shitead of leet skript trolliez reading slashdot knows how to poison the search results of a service that has become part of the everyday life.
Adult webmasters have been doing this for years. It's very cute that somebody who's in the business of developing straight web sites "just discovered" this. You people are a real hoot.
Agreed.
I think this story points to the demise of slashdot rather than Google. Google is doing exactly what is expected here, and the bloggers are only hurting themselves by ensuring that Google will make sure that the karma they can confer on a link is reduced.
Slashdot OTOH now seems desperate for revenue to the extent that they twist an amusing geek hack into the projected demise of one of the nets most respected, useful and smart corporations... for the purpose one can only suppose of upping their ad hits.
I rate this Google story as: -1 (Troll.)
What that guy did is literally *nothing* compared to what the company I work for has been doing for the last 3 years....
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
my orb? i dont have any idea. i see ads tho, well sometimes. sometimes i dont get them for some reason. but i never gave anyone any money so
- First, decide what kind of difficulty level you want, eq, pick a number from 2 - 10.
- Open your browser, and do brain.randomize();
- Pick N (where n stands for difficulty level) amount of characters from your brain.
- enter those characters with www and com concattenated to the beginning and to the end
- Hit enter
- And be amazed!!
On could also decide number of times to repeat this process and ++ each time a site is found and play the game with office mates so everybody will have a good timeyush
conversations with search engines, and it is even fun!
Interlinked nature of the web is similar to the interlinked nature of a human brain, where each word holds associations with other words and concepts. Search engines only add 'life' to this structure.
Google is the best troubleshooting engine while programming and fixing obscure error messages.
I think that search engines are the most intelligent things today.
So somebody's name shows up 666 times on Google. The word starts getting around. Pretty soon, people will start posting pages saying "XXX IS THE ANTICHRIST!"
Then of course, they return more than 666 hits on Google.
Ergo, no longer potential Antichrist material.
Perhaps all the pages accusing them of being an Antichrist will go away (about as likely as a smashed vase spontaneously reassembling, but it COULD happen), which will bring them back to 666 hits, and we start all over again...
j.
Since googlewhacking requires that you find just one page on the web that has two English words:
1. Obtain dictionary in electronic form.
2. Separate the words from the definitions
3. Publish to web page
4. Publish to another web page
5. If feeling particularly cruel, publish to additional web pages.
6. Wait for hate mail
Yum yum, gotta have some of THAT stew! ;)
Silly fingers, press the right keys. You'd think
that after this many years ytping, I'd get it
right...
Yeah, it is. How you like them apples?
Donkey and Porn are not 'orthogonal' in Internet Space at all!!
Now Oscilloscope and Porn. Now THERE's two orthogonal words.
Experiment!
So far, I've found a ton of em. Too Easy.
:)
My favorite though:
Thwack Googolplexes
Has anyone tried creating whack Chains, where searches on
word_1, word_2
word_2, word_3
...
word_n-1, word_n
will each return a single match?
Then create whack Cycles which would consist of
word_1, word_2
word_2, word_3
...
word_n, word_1
Finally, whack Sets where choosing any two words from a pool would result in a whack?
The goal of each of these would be to make them as large as possible.
This hack is a known thing. I've done considerable research on this, and Scientology has perhaps the best example of how to "hack" google.
Details here:
http://www.operatingthetan.com/google/
Whatever you think about the Scientology zealots, this is impressive - coordinating thousands of pages, sites, and links in order to single-mindedly achieve an objective... Dominance on the first page of a search for "Scientology" in order to quiet their many critics.
This falls down rather quickly, though. Go to google and search for "Scientology secrets", for example, and you'll find all kinds of anti-Scientology literature.
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Spammers get clients, too.
Liberty in your lifetime
They know that what makes them the best search engine is that they are based directly on what is on the web itself, not what people paid them to say. So while this method will work for a while, they will come up a way to fix it. Many posters have already suggested some reasonable methods.
I have to say the strength of google is its fluidity. Remember when google told us microsoft was "more evil than satan himself"? Now it seems that CNN talking about microsoft has taken that title.
Got Apathy?
Wouldnt it makes more sense if all the bloggers engaged in a google bomb linked to each other as well? This way they raise each other's page rank, making their site count even more towards boosting the target site.
Four us Swedes (or Norwegian, Finnish and Danish also I suspect) reading Slashdot, here is a funny way to see how Google totally misinterpret what we want to search for (in Swedish). Search for:
stora kikare
And watch what google thinks you are really looking for...
:)
Sometimes I have to do some SEO for clients. The basics involve making our content match popular keywords (that's either SEO or providing services that interest people... all in the spin), and making sure that Googlebot and other spiders can find it.
.sucks domains.
When we target niches (very few searches, little competition) it is easy to pop to the top. This makes sense, if Google only finds 200 matches on something, and I create a page focused on this topic, it should be easy to move to the top.
The bloggers have shown that you can EASILY move someone to the top of Google IF there are NO pages ACTUALLY on the topic (and who makes an "optimized" page on the topic of "talentless hack"), and you can make 1000 links to something from highly reputable sources.
I'm REALLY fucking impressed.
Now if blogs had the affect that they think they do, they could bump things up on REAL search terms. Instead, this is as cool as the phrase "dumb motherfucker" linking to then Gov. Bush's Presidential campaign site, merely because ONE (1) person linked to it with that phrase and since Google had no pages about "dumb motherfucker" in the index it threw this out.
Give me a fucking break. These guys have "undo" influence on the web because they achieved popularity (inbound links) and provide outbound links. They aren't appearing in the search results for something, but they provide Google with a clue.
All they've proven is that Google's algorithm does a REALLY good job of finding relevant content on the Internet. If no such content ACTUALLY exists, you can do near parlor tricks.
The MORE impressive action was when the guy's dispute with an ISP was beating the ISP for its own name. People linked to his article on the dispute, and it was considered a "relevant" source on the matter in Google's eyes. This means that criticism sites can do well in Google, even without
It also means that people can play games with Google. But for Slashdot to post such rubish as Google is collapsing and y'all to karma whore on the matter is poor form.
Alex
>In other words, it takes a large, concerted
> effort to deceive Google's engine, and this
> fact alone provides reassurance that Google is
> working according to plan.
Easy, non-concerted Juice method:
1) Get static IP
2) Register domain name.
3) Set up servers as, oh, say, server0001-server1001.myhost.com. Virtually, of course (yay, Apache!)
4) Link to target of choice. Be sure to crosslink to all the other "servers" in the chain for maximum effect.
Scientology did what any company or organization that needs to get its message out on the Internet did... get a mole into the appropriate Dmoz category as editor. Dmoz categories, even pretty far down, are normally PR4-PR5 on Dmoz, plus directory.google.com with the same PR.
Now, this PR is split between Dmoz's internal linking structure and the relevant links. So if Scientology puts up 1 page, it gets 1/11th that PR (Dmoz has ~10 internal links on each page). If they put up 100 pages, they take 10/11th of the PageRank and distribute among their sites. They then do internal linking.
This lets them have pages with GOOD link text from authority (high PR, the the hubs meaning) sites (Dmoz and good mirrors kike directory.google.com) plus their internal linking.
Dmoz providing good PR AND link text, well that's a REAL boost against the competition.
Alex
Reason being that your calculations assume that the number of permutations is wanted, whereas it is really the number of combinations that make up the potential googlewhack space. The 9 trillion number counts doubles with reversed order, ie it counts (button, thimble) and(thimble, button) as separate candidates.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. To test the logic on this, I pretended the language had 10 words and did it manually
David
Nobody on the Internet had a page about "dumb motherfucker" so Google did the best it could do and used the link text from one guys article. When Wired did a store, they created a page about, among other things, "dumb motherfucker". This created the change.
I mean, winning phrases that nobody searches for or puts out information isn't the most impressive thing. However, it creates a fun little game.
No problem, play games, have fun, whatever the fuck you want. But don't attack google's algorithm because of this stupid shit.
Google is the one "good guy" in the SE world right now, don't spread FUD about them for no reason.
Alex
Gee, you place too much weight on blogs and link text. It's a fucking retarded game!
Try to bomb Linux Kernel Howto.
It's a respectable page, PR7, with LOTS of incomign links for "linux kernel howto", the words "linux", "kernel", and "howto" are in the URL, the title is "The Linux Kernel Howto" and nearly the first text is an H1, "The Linux Kernel Howto".
In short, the top hit is a properly done HTML page on the top with the phrase in the right places. You CAN'T Googlebomb it WITH ALL the blogs in the world.
Drop your Slashdot paranoia. Google's algorithm works REALLY fucking well. It needs tweaks (the spam filters are a little too tight), but it finds relevant content for people looking for actual stuff.
You could problem do something like Googlebomb "insecure operating system made by satan" to microsoft.com, in fact something like that was done a few years ago. You could also probably Googlebomb the Linux Kernel Howto for (commie hippie goat cheese) or something equally silly.
Then you tell all your friends and its funny.
However, people ACTUALLY would search for "kernel linux howto" or whatever, and there is a page that provides that. You can't bomb it away like that.
Alex
As I invented the scoring scheme that helped this craze take off a couple of months ago(multiply the number of hits for each individual word), I would like to point out that it is a game, and not going to affect anyone's search results, as when you post the found GoogleWhack, all you are doing is making that odd combination one unit more popular.
My 'Pocket GoogleWhacker' tool is still available though (yes, there is a Linux version, but I haven't tested it as I don't have a Linux box). Also note that the highest scoring googlewhack by this method often use 'linux' as one fo the search terms
Side note: Papa John's (I think) did a similar thing a couple years ago when they claimed that you could made some great number possible of pizzas by combining their toppings. My high school's stat class quickly determined they were wrong and had made the same mistake I did here.
What?
That class got a bunch of free pizzas from them for to it too. bah!
The challenging aspect of google whacking is not in finding the pages, but rather is bringing yourself to go see what is on the page. E.g., it was easy to find pedophiliac regurgitation, but I'm not sure I want to click that link.
antidisestablishmentarianism ninjatune
1 &o e=ISO-8859-1&q=antidisestablishmentarianism+ninjat une
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-
1 response, unfortunately the page no longer exists, only cached
this was turning into an interesting article but i was forced to stare at a full page HP ad just to read the comments!
/. about how to use effective NON obtrusive ads!!
perhaps google has something to teach
who else gets that kind of service?
That ad ran on TV!
Write a perl script using an automatic comment generator to post comments to all your favoirte weblogs and blogs (Not as hard to generate seemingly relavant comments as you think!)
Here's a recent post at Webmasterworld.com that accuses certain bots of spamming old-style guestbooks with ads.
Of course, I doubt it really helps the spammer that much, since I doubt Google gives much weight to guestbooks. On the other hand, guestbooks are easy targets, since I don't think most of them are actually being read by human beings.
Proud to be / Smiley-free / Since Nineteen / Ninety-Three