Google defuses Google Bombs

Mountain View (CA) - Google hopes to stop the practice of "Google Bombing", the skewing of Google search results to point to a website, by implementing a new search algorithm. According to a blog entry written by Matt Cutts, Google’s official webmaster, the company has "improved our analysis of the link structure of the web" and adds that Google bombing effects should now be minimized.

Google bombing’s big start happened a few years ago when an enterprising blogger put the phrase "miserable failure" into his blog entry. The phrase hyperlinked to the official White House biography page of President George W. Bush. Of course, a single link doesn’t make a big dent as Google crawls through the Internet, but the blogger instructed his readers to put the same link on their websites causing several thousand more links to appear on Google’s computers. For a few years, a Google search for miserable failure would send you to the White House page as the numerous links upped the perceived relevance of the phrase to George Bush.

The impact of Google bombing has been minimal, at least from Google’s perspective. Up until now the company hasn’t implemented any algorithm changes nor did it try to edit search results by hand. "Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us," said Cutts.

Google’s went the algorithm route because of its massive compuing power. Cutts said, "Algorithms are great because they scale well : computers can process lots of data very fast."

For now the algorithm seems to have worked as miserable failure no longer puts the White House website as the top result. However, nothing on the Internet is static and we are sure that another blogger will figure out a more creative way to push up search results.