XKCD Inadvertently Causes Googlebomb

MrCopilot writes "As I noted yesterday (and was joined by many others)... in an offhand observation xkcd has singlehandedly changed a small section of the Internet. Changing the results from a Google search for "Died in a Blogging Accident" from 2 to (at this writing) over 7,170 in a little more than 24 hours." If you aren't reading xkcd, you're missing out.

Comments

Re:Blog writers prosecutions

[The13thSin]

I'm pretty sure those deaths don't count as accidents...

That's no bomb

[JackHoffman]

A Googlebomb is when a page becomes associated with an unfitting search term which doesn't appear on the page itself. This effect is caused when many website authors place misnamed links to that page, usually in an intentional and coordinated manner.

Re:That's no bomb

[Rob the Bold]

True. More of a googlewhack, really.

Re:teh intarnets

[csnydermvpsoft]

Nope, still around 6500. Try adding quotes to your search query.

I take exception

[Yurka]

to "inadvertently". You have no reason to assume that the author is not smart enough to have foreseen (and even counted on) this effect.

Actually, I take a separate exception to "inadvertantly".

The original Google Bomb is a VERY bad thing

[MichaelCrawford]

It's a form of Black Hat search engine optimization, in which you destroy a competitor's website. The way it's done is to set up a link farm of your own, but with every page pointing at your competitor's site. Eventually Google and the other search engine operators discover the link farm, but assume that your competitor put it there, and remove it from the index.

Thus they tell me at webmasterworld.

Re:The original Google Bomb is a VERY bad thing

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how it works. When Google recognizes a link farm, it discounts the effect of these links. The result is that the link farm no longer contributes positively to the page rank of the target page, but it does not penalize the target page beyond that. Google has punished sites for shady search engine optimization, but in those cases the sites had always used on-site techniques which could not have been performed by an outsider. Anyway, if that spamming technique could kick other sites out of the Google index, it would be called a "Joe job" (in analogy to the false flag email attack.)

A Google bomb is when many people link to a page and use the same unfitting link text, and then the target page moves UP in the rankings for that particular search term.

Re:The original Google Bomb is a VERY bad thing

[ben there...]

Google has punished sites for shady search engine optimization, but in those cases the sites had always used on-site techniques which could not have been performed by an outsider. Google does penalize for duplicate content. For example, if you setup your domain to have the same content on http://www.slashdot.org/ and http://slashdot.org/ a mirror rather than a redirect (notice the www. is a redirect here). It also penalizes content such as wiki-type content that gets mirrored in several sites around the web. Some webmasters have studied the effect of someone plagiarizing their content in this way and causing that effect. Though obviously their experiments couldn't have been very controlled.

A Google bomb is when many people link to a page and use the same unfitting link text, and then the target page moves UP in the rankings for that particular search term. I agree with you there. It's the only usage I've ever heard of the term. Such as "miserable failure". The first hit for that search used to be Bush's biography at whitehouse.gov, until the articles about the phenomenon itself pushed it down. Google likely fine-tuned their algorithm sometime along the way as well.

Re:And this is just adding to it

[UbuntuDupe]

No, you're confusing the Uncertainty Principle with the Observer Effect.

"The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is also frequently confused with the "observer effect". The uncertainty principle actually describes how precisely we may measure the position and momentum of a particle at the same time -- if we increase the precision in measuring one quantity, we are forced to lose precision in measuring the other. Thus, the uncertainty principle deals with measurement, and not observation. The idea that the Uncertainty Principle is caused by disturbance (and hence by observation) is not considered to be valid by some, although it was extant in the early years of quantum mechanics, and is often repeated in popular treatments."

Re:And this is just adding to it

[SNR monkey]

There seem to be a lot of xkcd readers here which makes it all the more surprising that someone has not pointed out that if you replace "blog" with "blag" (as xkcd is often inclined to do - "News/Blag") in the search "Died in a blogging accident", you get exactly two results. Just like the comic depicts.

Of course, now that I've posted this, people will probably go crazy running up its ranking too.

Not quite as many as thought...

[Dash Hash]

Not that this is really Slashdot-worthy, but... Who am I to decide what may or may not be worthy for this site.

Anyway, the actual number of results is far less.
Looking at Google right now, it shows "about 8,300" for the "died in a blogging accident" search.
However, actually going through and looking at the real number (skip to the end of the list, show all results, skip to the end again) and the results are much smaller.

Before enabling all references, there are a mere 243 results. Displaying all results, including those from the same site, yields only 849 hits.

While still interesting to see that it jumped from 2 to 849 in a day's time, it is still nowhere near 7000+ as advertised here.

Original Results

[pgn674]

I think I found the original 2 results of the search, when the number of results was still down at 12. Both results pointed to this blog: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=59755147&blogID=106406778

Re:Oblig.

[Xinef Jyinaer]

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,050 for "died in a skydiving accident". (0.23 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 220 for "died in a elevator accident". (0.05 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 505 for "died in a surfing accident". (0.11 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 486 for "died in a skateboarding accident". (0.11 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 168 for "died in a camping accident". (0.15 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 160 for "died in a gardening accident". (0.13 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 91 for "died in an ice skating accident". (0.07 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 461 for "died in a knitting accident". (0.14 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 8,360 for "died in a blogging accident". (0.12 seconds)
Curious indeed, seeing as some of them even decreased (elevator and ice skating)all the others managed to increase though most of them slightly, only knitting and blogging increased large amounts.
I'd attribute this to the fact that they were uncommon to begin with and then absolutely hilarious thus drawing more postings around the intertubes and on the blogosphere. Also thanks to the mod who made my original post redundant. You're my hero!!! A real value to society.

Not a googlebomb

[dotancohen]

Yay incorrect use of terminology. This is not a GoogleBomb