26 January 2007

Google defuse the Google bomb

The world famous "Google bomb" has finally been defused. For two years, we've seen the official George Bush biography website rank at the top of the Google index for the search term "miserable failure". Since December 2003, this has become a world famous example of Google bombing and was followed by our very own Tony Blair being bombed and consequently ranking high on the index for the term "liar".

A search today shows that the US president no longer tops the list for the term "miserable failure", due to a new Google algorithm process designed to stop online pranksters from influencing rankings. Google want to see legitimate commentary throughout the index in the future as they continue in their mission to make their search engine the world's most accurate information portal. Moreover, people may have been led to believe that the Google bomb results happened due to Google's endorsement of these particular views - something Google want to oppose by making these changes.

In the past, stopping the phenomenon of Google bombing was not seen as a priority for Google, especially since Google bombing has previously concentrated on terms which are far removed and of little relevance. However, the art of Google bombing has evolved considerably and is now at the stage where further development could interrupt more important areas of the Google index.

Google's search results are generated by computer programs which rank web pages largely by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases "failure" and "miserable failure" to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing the site to the top of searches for those phrases.

Google engineers have put their heads together and come up with a new algorithm which minimises the impact of many Google bombs.

In order to defuse Google bombs, Google can't simply disregard link text, as the entire ranking system may suffer as a result. Google are also unable to discount sites that don't use the terms contained in the links: i.e. they can't drop the George Bush site from the rankings because the pages don't contain the words 'miserable failure'. This is because pages often fail to use the terms for which they are relevant. Link text can help save them from being overlooked in these situations.

However, Google can track when links first point to particular sites. Perhaps the new system will look to see if there's a sudden spike of links all using the same words, which might indicate a Google bomb issue. At present, Google are understandably keeping their new algorithm rules under wraps - so we may only speculate at this stage as to their thinking.