Defused Googlebombs May Backfire

linguista submits for us today an article on the Guardian site, which theorizes Google's bomb defusing may backfire on the company. Article author Nicholas Carr calls out Google for tweaking search results based on the company public image. As he notes, the Google blog entry announcing the end to bombing didn't cite a desire for better queries as the reason behind the change. Instead "... we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception." While the general image of Google is still that it 'does no evil', it's worth noting that the search engine is not solely a link popularity contest. The results you get from Google are tweaked by a number of factors, and at the end of the day the company has complete control over what rises to the top.

Comments

Pitr?

[srw]

I'm not sure how they can keep saying they do no evil now that Pitr works there.

Re:Pitr?

[spellraiser]

Yes, it's kind of hard to reconcile.

Re:Pitr?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I forgot how much User Friendly sucks.

I see

[Anonymous Coward]

French Military Victories still works. Guess that one really must be objective information.

Careful

[markov_chain]

You guys will get Slashdot in trouble, what if the Boston police are reading this article?

Re:Axes to grind ?

[smoker2]

Luckily I like the fact Google does its best to cut out the nonsense spam sites which seem to be intent on swamping the web.

Yeah right, "Find Brain Surgery at Ebay" is always relevant to a search.

Re:Not specifically targetted

[anaesthetica]

Yeah, they looked into it more deeply and found that apparently what happened is that googlebombs originally weren't supposed to work, but through some kind of glitch in the algorithm, they still got a pagerank bump.

So they just went ahead and fixed the glitch. Googlebombs won't be receiving a pagerank bump, so it'll just work itself out naturally. Google always likes to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from their end.

Re:Not specifically targetted

[Kelson]

Um... yeah. Mr. Miserable Failure? We're going to have to ask you to move your desk down into the basement, mmmkay? And if you get a chance, while you're down there, you could squash some bugs in the code, that'd be great.

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

[cultrhetor]

But I miss "miserable failure!"

Re:Not specifically targetted

[skoaldipper]

Google is so smart they can anticipate EVERY POSSIBLE use of their code? If they are, they should buy M$ and fix all the damn bugs and security vulnerabilities in their products.

What? And put Symantec, McAfee, and countless IT professionals out of business? How dare you!

Actually, if you read the autobiographical companion to Earth in the Balance, in the book of Disseminations 3:2-10, Al Gore recounts a preminition that consumed him shortly after Clinton passed him the reefer:

"And I looked [fffft! ffffft! d-d-damn thats good shit Bill], and behold a pale white engineer [fffFFFT! FFFFT!... aHUh! aHUH!]: and his name that sat on him was googoo, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto him over the fourth part of [FFFFT! FFFFFFT! FFFFFFT! AHUH! AHUH!] m-m-my creation, to kill with [ahuh! ahuh!] adverts, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of [ahuh!] capitalism."

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

[Sponge Bath]

But I miss "miserable failure!"

Don't worry, he will be around for another 2 years.

Re:Axes to grind ?

[StikyPad]

Of course. Who wants to pay full price for brain surgery?

Re:Dubya's autobiography

[Eternal Vigilance]

Yeah, but I'll bet his attempts at writing an autobiography will be a miserable failure.

"My Pet Congress - a children's story by George W. Bush"