New Campaign Tactic - Google Bombing

jeian writes "My Direct Democracy, a liberal group blog, is trying out a new campaign tactic — Google bombing. From the New York Times article: 'Searching Google for Peter King, the Republican congressman from Long Island, would bring up a link to a Newsday article headlined King Endorses Ethnic Profiling.' Google's policy has typically been to not intervene and let the algorithms work by themselves, but could this change if Google-bombing becomes a common tactic?"

Comments

all's fair in love and war

[circletimessquare]

my gut feeling is let it be, and let the republicans do the same to democrats. welcome to politics. its nasty. always was, always will be

however, google in a very short time has come to inhabit a very important space in the media

it is largely unregulated in the usa now (not so in other countries), but it won't stay that way for long. too many powerful interests will have too many concerns about google and its power,and google will not survive unscathed

so i say: no regulation

but my brain tells me regulation of google is coming regardless

Re:Miserable Failure is the classic example

[jdunlevy]

Once a particular Google bomb gets noticed and talked about on the Web, that discussion of the Google bomb itself serves to help "the algorithms work by themselves": in the "miserable failure" example, the third and fourth results in that Google search are a BBC article about the "miserable failure" Google-bomb and the Wikipedia article about "Political Google bombs" -- the Google bomb still pushes its target to the top of search results, but related, following search results provide explanation and context.

Re:Thought Google Had Responded

[LiquidCoooled]

They haven't changed the algorithm just because pranksters have hijacked a couple of phrases and generally made people more aware of google (by advertising "have you tried going to google and typing ...."), they have done it to stop link farms and spam from getting through.

Linking by keywords is a very important aspect of how google manages to return relevant results.
The text a person uses to actually link to a site gives weight to the use of the destination site, to this end when linking we should always try to give a relevant phrase.
Linking slashdot as this is less useful than something like Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters.

Re:Miserable Failure is the classic example

[Ana10g]

I was with you right up until the point when you got all partisan on me. You totally lost me on that one. Instead of your statement, which read:

And the web really does have a whole ton of legitimate references to illegal and immoral acts by republican politicans.

It should read:
And the web really does have a whole ton of legitimate references to illegal and immoral acts by any politican.

There's absolutely no reason to pick on one side or the other, when the entire lot of politicians are completely corrupt, stupid, and need to be tossed out altogether in favor of honest people (if there are any left).