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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."
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
The Google Toolbar has a "Vote this site" button that you can click, and it sends the results back to Yours Truly.
It is a toolbar plugin for IE, so I guess we might have to scratch a large portion of the users here.
Darcy
Here is the Corante article.
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).
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
i've written a how-to on this; it's at http://www.blackant.net/other/random/how-to-google whack.php and repeated below for your convenience.
HOW-TO GoogleWhack
1) think of complex word, mispell it, and search dictionary.com for the misspelling.
example:
word: insullatory
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=insullatory
2) look through dictionary.com suggestions for a very odd-sounding word, look at definition of word.
example:3
word: inculcation
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=inculcation&r=
3) do google search for the word and for derivatives of the word.
example:
words tried: inculcation, inculcator
4) choose word that has the least google returns
example:
inculcation: 14100 returns
inculcator: 238 returns
we choose inculcator.
5) if the returns number more than 1000 for any word or derivative, go back to step 1.
6) in the google returns for the word selected, look for an odd word in the returns, preferably one that is unrelated to the definition of the first word.
example:
words: inculcator, adepts
7) do a google search for both words. if it has more than one return, go to step 5.
8) submit your googlewhack
example:
words: inculcator, tablet.
9) once you find one googlewhack, look at the page returned for more odd/awkward words. use these as potential new googlewhacks.
using this method, i found a googlewhack in less than ten minutes (took me longer to write this up) and have repeatedly done so.
-f
www.blackant.net
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
The new Google Toolbar has a "Vote for this Page" and a "Vote against this page" buttons.
If you find results that have been bombed, vote against them.
Unfortunately, the Toolbar requires Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP and Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5 or later, so I'll probably get flamed for this post.
danec. http://www.carlsoncarlson.com/dane/
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..."
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