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Defused Googlebombs May Backfire

Posted by Zonk on from the gooooobooooom dept.

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.

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Not specifically targetted by Bandman · · Score: 4, Informative

    They tweaked the algorythm so that it fixed googlebombs in general, not manually removed these particular bombs. In fact, in the text about the tweak, they specifically stated that they changed the algorythm so it would work with multiple languages, etc

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  2. Re:Sounds like sour grapes by garcia · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's just you IMHO. It sounds like someone that doesn't like the fact that Google is doing it for the sole reason of improving its image in the world and not for the reason that its algorithms shouldn't have allowed it to occur in the first place.

    To be honest, Googlebombs that point you to relevant information from somewhere else (i.e. linking a restaurant's name to your blog content from another post) is an important feature of Google's indexing. It should not be limited. Linking unrelated content ("failure" to various individuals that may or may not be) needed to be fixed.

    As long as their new methods allow for related content to continue to be linked to and unrelated content to be bumped, I'm good w/it.

  3. Re:Sounds like sour grapes by QuickFox · · Score: 5, Informative

    but other than that they do a pretty good job No, they do a terrible job. They endorse and encourage domain squatting.
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