A Google bomb or Google wash is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine. Due to the way that Google's PageRank algorithm works, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text. Googlebomb is used both as a verb and a noun.
See Spamdexing for the practice of deliberately and dishonestly modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner.
For example, if a user registers many domains and all of them link to a main site with the text "... is a living legend" then searching for "living legend" on Google will return the main site higher in the ranking, even if the phrase "living legend" doesn't appear on the main site. A common means of exploiting this is through weblogs, where although the entry may disappear from the main page quickly, the short-term effects of a link can dramatically affect the ranking of a given site. Empirical results indicate that it does not take a large number of websites to achieve a Googlebomb. The effect has been achieved with only a handful of dedicated weblogs.
The above statement has to be qualified, however. A handful of blog links will not Google bomb someone like Amazon out of the top results for "books," for example. In fact, Googlebombs have generally had an impact on relatively "non-competitive" terms, where there's no particular page that seems to be necessarily the right answer.
The technique was first discussed on April 6, 2001 in an article by Adam Mathes [1]. In that article, he coined the term "Google bombing" and explained how he discovered that Google used the technique to calculate page rankings. He found that a search for "internet rockstar" returned the website of a Ben Brown as the first result, even though "internet rockstar" did not appear anywhere on Brown's webpage. He reasoned that Google's algorithm returned it as the first result because many fan sites that linked to Brown's website used that phrase on their own pages.
Mathes began testing his theory by setting out to make the website of his friend Andy Pressman the number one result for a query of "talentless hack". He gave instructions for creating websites and links to Pressman's website with the text of the link reading "talentless hack". Sure enough, as other webloggers joined in his Googlebombing campaign, Pressman's website became the number one result in a Google search for "talentless hack". (Ironically, by 2004, Mathes's own site was the number one Google result of this search term.)
However, the first Google bomb mentioned in the popular press may have occurred accidentally in 1999, when users discovered that the query "more evil than Satan" returned Microsoft's home page. Now, it returns links to several news articles on the discovery.
Ironically, Google bombs often end their life by being too popular or well known, thereby attaining a mention in well regarded web journals and knocking the bomb off the top spot. It is sometimes commented that Google bombing need not be countered because of this self-disassembly.
In addition, the entire notion of "Google bombs" might be better described as "link bombing," given that these campaigns can certainly have an effect on other search engines, as well. All major search engine make use of link analysis and thus can be impacted. Thus, a search for "miserable failure" on 1 June 2005 brought up the official George W. Bush biography number one on Google, Yahoo and MSN and number 2 on Ask Jeeves. On 2 June 2005 Yooter reported that George Bush is now ranked first for the keyword 'failure' as well as 'miserable failure' in both Google and Yahoo.
The BBC in reporting on Googlebombs in 2002 actually used the headline of "Google Hit By Link Bombers," acknowledging to some degree the idea of "link bombing." In 2004, the Search Engine Watch site that the term should be "link bombing" because of the impact beyond Google and continues to use that term as more accurate.
Nevertheless, "Google bombing" was added to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005.
Hrmm - interesting! Ok perhaps I misjudged Google somewhat, though I still distrust the Valley (Silicon that is) having worked there once (sorry, fellow freepers who work/live there, I know it's not all San Francisco politics down there).
At least I can still use a decent search engine and not feel bad about it!