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Google Juice

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the matter-of-time dept.

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."

4 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Google has a long way to fall... by bmooney28 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  2. Re:User input could solve problems by Carmody · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Not quite as bad as it seems by alexjohns · · Score: 5, Insightful
    We've been talking about this on weblogs for a couple of months now. It's not as bad as it appears.

    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. :)

  4. This is a non-problem. by anser · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?