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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."
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
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...
This is still prone to abuse. What spammers mark all pages they don't like as crap?
jpenguin AT the google email service
It's a challenge. People have done far stupider things just to prove that they're better at something than everyone else. Just take a look into the Guinness Book of Records...
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
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.
That is to say, give users a free user account which could be used to give input on whats crap and whats not
For the sake of the discussion, let us call the users who are giving input "moderators."
As another poster mentioned, this system opens up a NEW can of worms, as spammers, idiots, and conservatives will use the system to call certain sites "crap", not because they are not relevant, but because they want the sites' listing to go down.
So then people would demand that the "moderators" were overseen, perhaps by a system of "meta-moderators", and you see where I am going with this.
God is real unless declared integer
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. :)
This trick was well known among SE users for at least 6 months now. Many people took advantage of it, especiall adult websites.
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?
sPh
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.
Yes, but what's the real significance? People aren't likely to go to Google and search for "dumb motherfucker" and laugh to see "George W. Bush" displayed, unless they're told to try it. They're going to search for "George W. Bush", and doing so spectacularly fails to produce a single result titled "dumb motherfucker".
It was a glitch, and a funny one, but it wasn't even remotely exploitable.
From a few months back, on the Register:
t ml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/23/20863.h
Seems like Google's been making money for a while now, mainly on licensing their search technology for intranets, as well as the online ads.
The Corporate Google device is just what they're selling now, but even more customer-friendly. Don't see why it'd not work.