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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.
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?
I read the internet for the articles.
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
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I'm not sure how they can keep saying they do no evil now that Pitr works there.
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.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Now, given that this originally was their strong point as compared to other search engines, and they picked up many more articles that were useful, yes, it might be a problem. However, you could also say that the simple fact that they used an algorithm that hadn't been gamed by all of the 'search engine optimized' as their real advantage, and there may be an advantage to changing it so that it's a moving target.
I mean, how awful would it be if we actually found the stuff we were looking for when we searched, rather than the search engine spam? If it gives worse results, then it's a problem
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
French Military Victories still works. Guess that one really must be objective information.
Google should expose at least part of their ranking formula as a dead-simple GUI to control parameters to Google users. That way we can control our own "Google" rankings according to our own agendas. People could share their params with friends so we don't have to figure out what to do to be trustworthy, just which of our friends' searching techniques we trust. Just like in the real world.
Doing so would go a long way towards making it less necessary to trust Google. Eventually we would be best served by a totally open ranking client that searches multiple competing backend indices. But if Google handed us "trust web" to do it ourselves, they'd probably preempt that inevitable infomediation that would also disconnect them from the users, and thereby from their highest value relationship.
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You guys will get Slashdot in trouble, what if the Boston police are reading this article?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
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...
Here are a few shining turds from TFA:
Wow! What the hell motivation do you think Google was built on in the first place? The motivation was to achieve popularity, by being a good search engine. Yes, that's the "public image" they aimed for. So, what changed?
OMG. Do you actually mean to tell me... I didn't invent Google?
Seriously, the entire lame article was just one big excuse to use the word "salubrious".
You might - it depends on the author. ;)
However, you're correct that you won't find it in his autobiography.
Still - good point about the page actually containing the phrase that was being searched for.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
See this Yahoobomb, which faithfully links to the world's number one mostest miserable failure of all time.
Microsoft's search offering (a Billbomb?) only comes up with Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore, at places two and seven respectively, with the rest of the results being links to stories about the Googlebomb as it pertains to that miserable failure .
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"