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

Sounds like sour grapes

[jandrese]

Is it just me, or does it sound like this was written by someone who was previously making a living off of increasing people's pagerank and is now miffed that his job is harder?

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

[drinkypoo]

More telling is his conclusion, which typically is a summary of the article, in which he basically says "google belongs to google". Wow. Now THAT is a revelation. Next thing you'll tell me is that the police department doesn't belong to me. That might really break my mind.

He's not even arguing that preventing googlebombing is a bad thing! All he says is that he's concerned that google is preventing googlebombing to protect their corporate image. I have news for this idiot: google is a corporation. They have a corporate image. If they want to keep doing business with other corporations, they have to protect it.

On top of all that, the corporate image google wishes to present is of a company that does no evil. Arguably they fall down on their ass on this whole China censorship thing, but other than that they do a pretty good job and preventing mob rule in the form of googlebombing is definitely not evil.

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

[Threni]

No, it's not just him. When I go to Google, I expect to spend as little time as possible finding what I want. Google should know what I'm looking for, and by and large it succeeds. If some sad bunch of nerds wants to manipulate sites so that a bogus link between a phrase and a person/organisation is created then they are of course free to do so, and Google is free to take whatever steps it likes to fight it. There's always robots.txt, isn't there, if you want to ensure no-one ever visits your site. Or there's cheating, and getting caught by Google.

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

[Irish_Samurai]

Do you understand how Bayesian statistics work?

Yeah, it wouldn't be anything like this part of my post would it?

Google doesn't know everything about everything. So this "sad bunch of geeks" that are out "manipulating" the search results are actually the backbone of google's original ontological analysis. If there is a huge spike in term to concept linkage, Google (in theory) recognizes it and begins to retroactively evaluate their previously indexed relationships.

My problem isn't with Google, or the googlebomb for that matter, its the kid thinking that a system should automatically know what he wants no matter what he put into it.

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

[susano_otter]

Next thing you'll tell me is that the police department doesn't belong to me. That might really break my mind.

Actually, unless you toil under a non-democratic regime, the police department does belong to you.

Of course, it belongs equally to several hundred thousand of your fellow citizens, and you've all agreed on a layer of bureaucracy between you and the police, to prevent each of you from trying to exercise direct control over the police department on an individual basis according to your whims and moods.

If you can think of a better way to manage a publically-owned police department, I'm sure political scientists the world over would be eager to hear about it.

Axes to grind ?

[CmdrGravy]

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 You don't say ! 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. Whoever wrote this article seems to me to be a little too concerned about this and makes me suspect he is some kind of spam merchant himself.

Re:Axes to grind ?

[krotkruton]

That's what I thought at first too, but then I thought about my mom, who only three years ago asked me how to rewind the DVD before taking it back to the video store and last year told me to stop signing up for porn on her computer (which I never even use) because she keeps seeing ads that say "Girls from want to date you!". Just yesterday my roommate asked got an instant message from some girl he didn't know that asked him to check out a picture of them so she could add it to facebook, and he actually clicked the link to check it out and then wondered why his computer started acting funny. The point I'm trying to make is that a lot of people don't know how Google works, and it might be a good idea for some of us who do know to inform them. Then again, I'm not sure it would make much of a difference anyway.

Sounds To Me

[moore.dustin]

Sounds to me like Google just made their product/service better is all. Of course Google can control what goes to the top of the search engine - that is what they do. They are "doing no evil" by upgrading and refining their algorithms if anything.

Just because people cannot ghost and bomb their pages to get quick boosts in pagerank does not mean that Google is doing evil, it just means they were never good at their jobs to begin with.

Nothing to see here, please move along...

[honkycat]

Google's explanation for why they hadn't fixed this in the past was that Googlebombs never displaced useful searches. That is, they didn't get in the way of many people actually trying to find information. The canonical, "miserable failure" example illustrates this -- is there any reason to expect that Google would give you useful hits for that search? I can't think of a reason to use that search that unless you were just curious about what Google would return.

It was clear from Google's release that they considered the Googlebombs a perhaps amusing nuisance, but it wasn't something they supported. Rather, it just wasn't worth the effort of fixing since that effort would be at the cost of other development that they felt would do more to improve user searches.

Now, they found that people were assuming these funny responses were somehow endorsed by Google. They could put up a disclaimer, but a) not many people actually read fine print, and b) many would not believe the disclaimer anyway. Since the Googlebombs didn't actually serve any useful purpose and Google didn't want to be mistaken for endorsing whatever might be inferred from the presence of these odd search results, they did away with it. That's perfectly legitimate.

So, Google really DID claim they were making a minor improvement to their search results through this change, but that wasn't the highest priority. It's not like they've got any particular duty to maintain details of the PageRank algorithm. Further, protecting their image IS an important goal, particularly when it can be done through a means that has a positive impact on the searches. Too bad that a cute Google game is gone, but another one will crop up before long, I'm sure...