Googlebomb: A prank where people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank for an obscure or meaningless query. Also known as linkbomb.
Google has known about these “Googlebombs” for quite some time now, yet they felt that because the phrases were “well off the beaten path,” they haven’t been high priority to fix. For example, previously by typing in failure, the first result was for the White House page on President Bush. It’s a way for a website to get ranked #1 on Google for any term.
On the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog they mention that it has become more of a priority for them simply because some people felt that Google had hand-coded those results, or that it was their opinion. One solution would be to go in and manually change the results for those Googlebombs; afterall, they say that there are under a hundred that are well-known. But, we’re talking about Google here who use Algorithms for just about everything. A few people at Google got together and created an Algorithm that will detect Googlebombs in different languages so that hopefully, most of them can be detected.
They’re not claiming that it’s the perfect solution and that it can handle any prank, but it catches most of them so that searches for terms like “failure” should be more relevant.
Source: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [ via Tech Reads]
It’s about time they got around to this. For years Google touted that spammers and such couldn’t skew the search results.
When this problem was first discovered it should have been addressed immediately! The accuracy of their search results is what sets them apart from their competitors. Anything that artificially manipulates those results should be given top priority.
Well, it is about time that got fixed!
I think it is awesome that they developed an algorithm to correct the issue, but I just wonder how they did it. I’ve been trying to think of what they could check for to do this automatically, but I’m stumped. I guess that’s why Googlers get paid so much.
I find it a little ironic that a search for “failure” used to return results for President Bush but now Michael Moore is in the top 10.
I’m just saying…
There are many advanced AI topics that can handle things like this. Even Thunderbird uses and adaptive spam filter. AI is everywhere!