Obama gets Googlebombed
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Google, Internet on
A few years back, if you searched for ‘miserable failure’ at Google you quite understandably found a biography of George W Bush right at the top of the results heap. This was due to a certain type of prank which enabled people to influence search results for particular keywords. The process and the prank became known as Googlebombing.
Over the weekend it would appear that the new President of the United States, none other than Saint Barack Obama (at least I think he is now officially a saint, seems that way from the media coverage of his election victory) became the latest victim of the Googlebombing pranksters.
If you performed a Google search for ‘failure’ or indeed one looking for ‘cheerful achievement’ then it was the Obama biography page which rose inexplicably to the top. Heck, even the most stern Obama critic would be hard pressed to call his term in office a failure given that he’s been there less than a week!
It would appear that all the links that used to point to the Bush bio for ‘miserable failure’ had been redirected to point at the Obama one when Bush officially left office. The Googlebomb algorithm developed by Google to detect these things is, according to a Google insider, rather resource intensive as it processes the entire web index. As a result, and because Googlebombs are actually pretty rare events, “we tend not to run it all the time.”
Any-hoo, Google has now run the thing and it detected the Obama Googlebomb which has now been defused. I guess you really shouldn’t misunderestimate how politics can bring out the pranskters.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by - October 26, 2009 on 9:51 am
Is it REALLY “political bias” to believe Bush actually was a miserable failure? Since when is an objective observation a political bias? IMO, it would be political bias to believe otherwise.
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