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

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: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: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."