Defused Googlebombs May Backfire

Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 1, 2007 @06:39AM 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.

1 of 105 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Sounds like sour grapes by Anonymous Coward · 2007-02-01 10:45 · Score: -1, Offtopic

Can't comment on your homepage article on the Amiga as the comments are closed, so I am chasing you here.

I sortof agree on your point of obsolescence of planar graphics, but disagree that it wasn't "fixable".

The chips in the Amiga could have moved more heavily into animation (ie: real-time compositing & blending), AA / font handling / scaling and/or 3d hardware (3dfx textured triangles way).

The need for graphic accelerators didn't stop because we had the bandwidth to do full screen 24bits.

(Of course, the OS with no memory protection, was as dead as MacOS. But MacOS managed to survive for /years/)

Anyway, interesting post.