NationStates Jolt Archive

No more poking fun at the frenchies and dubya. :(

But I think some smart fellow will eventually find a way to circumvent this algorithm that google have put in place to defuse the so-called link bombs / google bombs.

Google defuses `link bombs`
Wednesday, 31 January , 2007, 16:14

San Francisco: US President George W. Bush is no longer Google's top response to Internet searches for "miserable failure."

Queries for French military victories no longer take one to "defeats."

Links to web pages about Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva no longer pop up in searches in Portuguese for "drunken despot."

And Russian Internet users that type "enemy of the people" into Google are not directed to a biography of that nation's leader, Vladimir Putin.

The Mountain View, California-based search colossus says it has finally defused such "Googlebombs," search term results rigged by clever outsiders to make comic or critical commentary.

"By improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs," Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini of Google wrote in a company weblog.

"Now, we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead."

Google described the programming change as "pretty small," saying there were fewer than 100 well-known Googlebombs, also referred to as "link bombs" because they provide links to unrelated websites under the guise of answering the query.

For example, a Google search for French military victories had prompted a replica of a search engine page and the question "Did you mean military defeats?" as though the searcher's original quest was in vain.

Searches for "failure," "fiasco," and "miserable" in various languages resulted in links to various countries' current or former leaders.

A search in Danish for "primitive troll" provided a link to an official page for that nation's prime minister, while the query "mouton insignificant" (unimportant sheep) led searchers to a biography for the premier of Quebec, Canada.

"Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us," Moulton and Carattini explained in their blog.

"But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true."

Rather than deactivating Googlebombs by hand, Google engineers developed a search algorithm to neutralize them.

"Computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in many different languages," Moulton and Carattini wrote.

"That's what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages."

Google ranks search results based on a mathematical model that factors in key words and popularity of websites.

While Google has known about link bombs for years, it had previously expressed reluctance to defuse them individually because it didn't want to tinker with the objectivity of its Internet search model.

Google cautioned that some link bombs will slip past the algorithm net, which will be tightened based on feedback from searchers.

US President George W. Bush is no longer Google's top response to Internet searches for "miserable failure." Bush is no longer a miserable failure ?
the white house should hire the Google programmers. :D

Aww... why do people have to take the fun out of everything?

Lol I agree. What's the fun in that? Everyone wants fun, don't take it away!! :(

As of the time I posted this, the Santorum googlebomb still works. I hope it stays that way. But it is a little disappointing that Google defused the others...takes a lot of fun out of the Internets and it seems a little like a form of censorship: after all, Google is just supposed to provide the most-linked-to sites in response to a query (or something like that).

As of the time I posted this, the Santorum googlebomb still works. I hope it stays that way. But it is a little disappointing that Google defused the others...takes a lot of fun out of the Internets and it seems a little like a form of censorship: after all, Google is just supposed to provide the most-linked-to sites in response to a query (or something like that).
Not even. Companies pay to have their websites show higher up on the list for certain key words.
There’s a reason Google’s worth 150 billion.
For perspective, Time Warner is only worth about 80 billion.

As of the time I posted this, the Santorum googlebomb still works. I hope it stays that way. But it is a little disappointing that Google defused the others...takes a lot of fun out of the Internets and it seems a little like a form of censorship: after all, Google is just supposed to provide the most-linked-to sites in response to a query (or something like that).

Santorum Google bomb? What this be? I only knew of the Dubya and Frenchie ones, meself.

As of the time I posted this, the Santorum googlebomb still works. I hope it stays that way. But it is a little disappointing that Google defused the others...takes a lot of fun out of the Internets and it seems a little like a form of censorship: after all, Google is just supposed to provide the most-linked-to sites in response to a query (or something like that).

No google's (being a search engine) only job is to provide us with the information we are looking for

How they go about determining and ranking such information is related to the quality of their service rather then the service in and of itself. As such disabling "Google bombs" is an improvement in quality of service as it gets rid of false positives.

That being said google and all other major search engines have not been "most-linked to" site ranking orientated for a long long time, and rightfully so there are lot more considerations such as word term weight ... the weight of the linking page (example if CNN links to something it has more weight then lets say a blog)

Denny's Menu still works.

I'm sad they're going.

There's got to be a way around this.