Have We Just Been Google-Bombed? (Clueless Barf Alert)

WASHINGTON, 29 May 2004 — When one “googles” Saudi Arabia on the Internet, you find that there are currently almost 7 million references listed. When you enter “Saudi Arabia” and “terrorism” together on Google, the most popular Internet search engine, you discover about 800,000 references. “How Saudi Arabia Spreads Terrorism” is the first and most prominent entry. You may have just been “Google-bombed”.

In the current issue of the New Yorker magazine, James Surowiecki, introduces the concept of Google-bombing to his readers and explains how people are now manipulating Google for their own ends.

Suroweicki points out that if you type in “miserable failure” and click the “I’m feeling lucky” tab, you are not directed to an article about the Chicago Cubs baseball team, which hasn’t won a World Series in over 50 years or a failed movie, but, rather to the White House website and the official biography of President George W. Bush. You’ve been Google-bombed!

Google-bombing has now become more than a party game. Google is extremely efficient and makes decisions for you about the relative importance of the sources for the topic that you are searching.

How does Google work and how are the Google decisions made for us? According to Suroweicki, Google relies on the collective intelligence of the web itself. He points out that at the core of Google’s technology is a voting system. Every website link to another website is treated as a vote and sites that get more votes are considered more valuable. In the Google system, these votes, in turn, are weighted to have more influence. Other factors like font size and word location are also taken into consideration, but the web pages that Google rates the best, are the pages that the entire web thinks are the best.

Suroweicki notes that an entire new industry has developed around the business of maximizing Google rankings. He refers to this business as the racket of “search engine optimization.” Some American companies literally have armies of programmers working in developing world countries solely to boost their Google rankings. He states that much of the work that that the “optimizers” do is reasonable and helps the companies do a better job of building pages to which others will want to link. He calls this work “white hat tactics”.

However, he also refers to the dark side of this business. This he calls “black hat tactics” which use “index spammers” — who are adopting the methods and tricks of old political machines.

On the web, companies “cloak” or disguise the real content of their sites in attempting to trick Google into thinking that a page is relevant to a search. Some well-financed sources pay other sites to link to their sites to give an illusion of popularity. And some companies set up “link farms”— a series of interconnected websites, which exist mainly to link to each other. And the major companies can, according to Suroweicki, buy thousands of domain names, set up websites and effectively create thousands of links out of nothing.

Google doesn’t like to be tricked. It is about to launch its multibillion dollar IPO public stock offering and it could lose a lot of its credibility if Google-bombing continues to flourish.

The Google company recently submitted an IPO filing and it noted that the threat from index spammers was “ongoing and increasing”. Google has also launched a campaign to thwart this threat through various methods. But the tricksters will surely continue to try to outsmart Google with new methods and devices.

Now let’s get back to Saudi Arabia on the web and the use of Google to research the Kingdom.

Years ago, when research was beginning through electronic means, it was exceptional to find more than a few references weekly to Saudi Arabia and Saudis. Through electronic news information sources today such as Lexus-Nexus and news web sources such as AOL or Yahoo, one now often finds more than 1000 references a day to Saudi Arabia. And the overwhelming majority of those sources are negative, particularly the initial pages and initial sources referenced.

Google is now the source of choice for web users and researchers. Whether one is a casual user of the web or an in-depth researcher, we go to Google. And no one is going to look at all of the 7 million references to Saudi Arabia.

Has Saudi Arabia been Google-bombed? Even a cursory look at “Saudi Arabia” and topics related to Saudi Arabia on Google gives the web user answers to this question. On the other hand, one can also easily google the topic of “Israel.” Israel currently has almost 31 million sources listed on Google. The topic of “Israel” seems to be loaded initially with mostly positive references.

Google-bombing can be used many different ways both positively and negatively. Pro-Israeli organizations are known for their hard work and effective use of public relations. Do we have “black hat” tacticians influencing the Internet when it comes to the terms “Saudi Arabia” And do these tacticians put on their “white hat” when it comes to Israel? Further research needs to be done to determine this, but it is certainly a topic that needs further exploration.

Try a little of this research yourself. Oh, and while you’re at it; try entering the term “weapons of mass destruction” on Google and clicking “I’m feeling lucky”. Look carefully at the next page — Google-bombing at its best!

Google is on record as saying they only allow Google-bombing for results that are of no actual relevance to life. For example, nobody would ever seriously need to use Google to find real results on the topic of "miserable failure," so they let it stand. But whenever some group of people tries to start screwing around with the results of a legitimate search topic, Google's staff will go in and manually tell the software to ignore the attempts.

So the successful google bombing of President Bush will stand while they may intervene in the attempted google bombing of the Kerry campaign with the word "waffles"? It finally works but I could easily see them removing it.

Then again the moderators at news.google.com seriously believe that Democratic Underground is a "news" site and not a place where racist, seditious ranting occurs. They have told me that true hate literature will not be tolerated. I've given them examples in the past but I always hear that it is "just a difference of opinion". Yeah.

When I look up "Jew Watch" I expect to find a site where I can buy a timepiece with a Hebrew dial and not some nazi forum.

"Jew Watch" may be a reprehensible site, but it does exist, thus Google has to link to it, or the free speech advocates would be all over them. (Google claims to ban no links to anything on the web, except for sites that are nothing more than specific attempts to artificially mess with Google results.)

A better comparison would be if there was no such site as "Jew Watch," and a bunch of antisemites started a Googlebombing campaign to make the term "jew watch" link to another Nazi site. Likewise, there is no "Miserablefailure.com." (Someone's registered the name, but it's just a link to a placeholder.) If there was such a site, Google would intervene to insure it was the top link no matter how many people tried to Googlebomb a Bush bio into the top slot.

In fact, Google has issued a statement about the results you get for "Jew Watch" and the like. It should be posted here, I think.

An explanation of our search results.

If you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result.

If you use Google to search for "Judaism," "Jewish" or "Jewish people," the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like "Judaism," "Jewish people," or "Jews" than the single word "Jew." In fact, prior to this incident, the word "Jew" only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it's likely that the great majority of searches on Google for "Jew" are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.

Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google. Some people concerned about this issue have created online petitions to encourage us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Because of our objective and automated ranking system, Google cannot be influenced by these petitions. The only sites we omit are those we are legally compelled to remove or those maliciously attempting to manipulate our results.

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Sincerely,
The Google Team

p.s. You may be interested in some additional information the Anti-Defamation League has posted about this issue at http://www.adl.org/rumors/google_search_rumors.asp. In addition, we call your attention to both the Jewish Internet Association, an organization that addresses online anti-semitism, at http://www.jewishinternetassociation.org/, and Google's search results on this topic.

Unless they do remove it, I'm not sure what your point is here. The Kerry For President site is the #1 result for "waffles" right now. If it were to be removed, it might be because the legitimate owner of waffles.com complains. But on the other hand, the "legitimate" site is only the third-most-popular "waffles" site anyway, so they'd probably have less of a case.

They don't link to DU threads, just DU articles. FR doesn't have an articles section. I don't know why they don't link to FRN articles, but they certainly cover a whole host of conservative opinion sites.

The point was about "waffles" being a name for a product (even if there were no "waffles.com", people still buy/sell/look for recipes for waffles. A link to the Kerry Campaign website is a false lead even if the word fits). If Google is going to let some google bombs stand and possibly remove others, it is a practice that should actively be discouraged in ALL cases.

I've pointed out vile hate in DU's "opinions" section (that was where I first noticed news.google.com cited DU as "news"). Some of the other examples I later offered to them were from the forums. The location of the comments didn't seem to matter too much to the moderator and they did seem somewhat concerned by some of the comments (like a death threat made against American troops) but DU pulled that thread after it made the wire services.

I tell them what DU represents but they choose to pull the wool over their eyes.

I do not write any opinion pieces for FR but I read some of the opinion pieces on FR. Reportedly some on FR have unsuccessfully tried to get their work included in "news.google.com".

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.