Stupid Google Tricks

Fun Google Bombings already out there (the number one site returned by google for the given search entry):

French Military Victories
Miserable Failure (also can be searched as a news story -- currently it's Michael Moore, used to be GWB)
More Evil Than Satan Himself (links to a CNN story from 1999!)
weapons of mass destruction
organized crime (libertarians trying to google bomb the IRS... not yet #1)


From the NYTimes:
Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.

The perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link). The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site.

"I'm actually surprised how easy it was to do," said the mastermind of the Bush effort, George Johnston, 46...


But it's not just a matter of getting 20 webmasters to link to your desired target with your desired phrase. You've got to pick an obscure search term (you'll never get the search term "computer" to divert to anything but Apple or Dell). And you'll never get any results unless your 20 webmaster friends run some popular sites (Google prioritizes somewhat based on popularity -- but pageRank is complex). Either that, or get 500 unpopular sites and you may make headway.

Google says this is just a novelty, a fad, but I can imagine a few dozen CS classes trying this, every semester. They have the knowhow, the connections, and the perpetual mischievousness. Right now a few terms out of Google's 200 million daily are corrupted. Will it ever reach 1%?

Yeah, probably not. But I do believe we'll see a huge coordinated campaign to corrupt a popular search term before long. Not "miserable failure" but something ... from the Lycos Top 50?

Why not google bomb 'sex' away from thousands of pr0n sites and toward Disney? That's the kind of prank everyone can enjoy.