Google Defuses Googlebombs

John C. Worsley writes "Google announced today a modification to their search algorithm that minimizes well-known googlebombing exploits. Searches on 'miserable failure' and their ilk no longer bring up political targets. The Google blogger writes: 'By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead.'"

Comments

Big changes?

[LiquidCoooled]

Surely this changes lots of things.

If google is now discounting the wording other people use to link to a page, then isn't google themselves becoming like old fashioned engine, ie only specifically accounting for information on the actual page and not based on what other people who link to this page thinK?

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead.

reworded becomes:

By ignoring the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return only results which are from the actual page itself rather than looking at how other people link to each other.

A googlebomb is not a bad thing, its making use of the algorithm to expand the keywords which a page is associated with.

Sidenote:

I did a search for google, and the snippet that comes up under each google entry does not exist on the page itself, where does it actually come from?

for example:

Google
The local version of this pre-eminent search engine, offering UK-specific pages as well as world results.
www.google.co.uk/ - 4k - 24 Jan 2007 - Cached - Similar pages


I thought google weren't meant to display a different page to bots as to users? (didn't they get in trouble for something similar not so long ago?)

Re:Big changes?

[drinkypoo]

If google is now discounting the wording other people use to link to a page, then isn't google themselves becoming like old fashioned engine, ie only specifically accounting for information on the actual page and not based on what other people who link to this page thinK?

Not necessarily. It depends, like most other things, on how it is handled. The practice of googlebombing is the practice of mob rule and google quite sensibly worked to put a stop to it.

A googlebomb is not a bad thing, its making use of the algorithm to expand the keywords which a page is associated with.

A googlebomb IS a bad thing, it's a group of people with an agenda railroading the functionality of a resource upon which the health of the internet depends in a very real way. Again, it's mob rule; a certain segment of the population runs away with the whole idea.

I thought google weren't meant to display a different page to bots as to users? (didn't they get in trouble for something similar not so long ago?)

Are you saying that bots are getting different search results than users? Because absolute shitloads of websites serve different versions of their pages to google for a wide variety of reasons. For example some premium sites allow google to index part of their content in order to rope people into buying a subscription.