A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data [lib search hackers]

new york times ^ | 10/26/06 | TOM ZELLER Jr.

[mathprof]

If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks, searching Google for “Jon Kyl,” the Republican senator from Arizona now running for re-election, will produce high among the returns a link to an April 13 article from The Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly.

Mr. Kyl “has spent his time in Washington kowtowing to the Bush administration and the radical right,” the article suggests, “very often to the detriment of Arizonans.”

Searching Google for “Peter King,” the Republican congressman from Long Island, would bring up a link to a Newsday article headlined “King Endorses Ethnic Profiling.”

Fifty or so other Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated “Google bombing” campaign intended to game the search engine’s ranking algorithms. By flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.

The project was originally aimed at 70 Republican candidates but was scaled back to roughly 50 because Chris Bowers, who conceived it, thought some of the negative articles too partisan.

[mathprof]

remember the libs also want "net neutrality" if they win in 06.

[theDentist]

I like google, it's far more efficient a search engine than any others out there. But I just won't use it any more. I'm deleting it from my favorites.

[SuperSonic]

Posted yesterday by areafiftyone:

The Election 2006 Republican Googlebomb - Leftists Planning a Googlebomb

[af_vet_rr]

Nothing stopping Conservative bloggers from doing the same thing, unless they think it's just easier to bitch and moan and write about it.

[gcruse]

It isn't hacking.

[Jim Verdolini]

No, but try to find some things, some political things, on Google. Try to find accurate info on Iraq casualties and you find pages and pages of dung about the lancet study, not refuting the mess, but supporting this bogus numbers.

If folk can manipulate the engine to make some specific topics overwhelmingly partisan unless one is willing to search 10 pages of data, then they control the internet argument.

[sure_fine]

google the word ' failure '

[af_vet_rr]

If folk can manipulate the engine to make some specific topics overwhelmingly partisan unless one is willing to search 10 pages of data, then they control the internet argument.

There is nothing stopping Conservatives from doing the same thing. This has been going on since at least 2003, but I'm not surprised the press decides to regurgitate stories.

As it stands, if Google were to make changes to try and nullify this, it would radically change a lot of things, and make searches less effective overall. It's underhanded, but there is nothing stopping the right from doing this.

[trooprally]

I've heard that Al Goremooran is on the Board of Google. So its no wonder that they are "fixing" the searches.

Also, didn't Google eliminate certain anti-government search results in China?

Looks like FR needs to get a Boycott Google campaign going.

[Mr] T

[Donna Lee Nardo]

No, it isn't hacking.

It is actually a very good and original use of new media. I wish we thought of this first!

[Donna Lee Nardo]

All it takes is money to manipulate the search engine pages. As soon as the big search engines allowed folks to buy positions, well, that ended what was a good and wholesome thing. I understand why they did this, but...

Walking over all the garbage certainly makes all searches on the free search engines much more time consuming.