Defused Googlebombs May Backfire

linguista submits for us today an article on the Guardian site, which theorizes Google's bomb defusing may backfire on the company. Article author Nicholas Carr calls out Google for tweaking search results based on the company public image. As he notes, the Google blog entry announcing the end to bombing didn't cite a desire for better queries as the reason behind the change. Instead "... we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception." While the general image of Google is still that it 'does no evil', it's worth noting that the search engine is not solely a link popularity contest. The results you get from Google are tweaked by a number of factors, and at the end of the day the company has complete control over what rises to the top.

Sounds like sour grapes

Is it just me, or does it sound like this was written by someone who was previously making a living off of increasing people's pagerank and is now miffed that his job is harder?

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

No, it's not just him. When I go to Google, I expect to spend as little time as possible finding what I want. Google should know what I'm looking for, and by and large it succeeds. If some sad bunch of nerds wants to manipulate sites so that a bogus link between a phrase and a person/organisation is created then they are of course free to do so, and Google is free to take whatever steps it likes to fight it. There's always robots.txt, isn't there, if you want to ensure no-one ever visits your site. Or there's cheating, and getting caught by Google.

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

Do you understand how Bayesian statistics work?

Yeah, it wouldn't be anything like this part of my post would it?

Google doesn't know everything about everything. So this "sad bunch of geeks" that are out "manipulating" the search results are actually the backbone of google's original ontological analysis. If there is a huge spike in term to concept linkage, Google (in theory) recognizes it and begins to retroactively evaluate their previously indexed relationships.

My problem isn't with Google, or the googlebomb for that matter, its the kid thinking that a system should automatically know what he wants no matter what he put into it.

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

but other than that they do a pretty good job

No, they do a terrible job. They endorse and encourage domain squatting [google.com].

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

Next thing you'll tell me is that the police department doesn't belong to me. That might really break my mind.

Actually, unless you toil under a non-democratic regime, the police department does belong to you.

Of course, it belongs equally to several hundred thousand of your fellow citizens, and you've all agreed on a layer of bureaucracy between you and the police, to prevent each of you from trying to exercise direct control over the police department on an individual basis according to your whims and moods.

If you can think of a better way to manage a publically-owned police department, I'm sure political scientists the world over would be eager to hear about it.

Re:Sounds like sour grapes

But I miss "miserable failure!"

Don't worry, he will be around for another 2 years.

Not specifically targetted

They tweaked the algorythm so that it fixed googlebombs in general, not manually removed these particular bombs. In fact, in the text about the tweak, they specifically stated that they changed the algorythm so it would work with multiple languages, etc

Re:Not specifically targetted

Exactly. I'm tired of people jumping to the conclusion that Google used some crude, quickfix solution to googlebombs, like manually removing that particular bomb, or ending the use of links and pagerank. PLEASE -- give them just a teensy weensy bit of credit here. If you really think they just inserted those particular phrases (e.g., "miserable failure") directly into the search engine's code, then please -- try another Googlebomb. If the fix really was just for the known, existing googlebombs, you should have no problem stacking Google's results again. If you can't do that, then do us a favor, and shut the hell up until you know what you're talking about.

Re:Not specifically targetted

Yeah, they looked into it more deeply and found that apparently what happened is that googlebombs originally weren't supposed to work, but through some kind of glitch in the algorithm, they still got a pagerank bump.

So they just went ahead and fixed the glitch. Googlebombs won't be receiving a pagerank bump, so it'll just work itself out naturally. Google always likes to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from their end.

Pitr?

I'm not sure how they can keep saying they do no evil now that Pitr works there.

Re:Pitr?

Yes, it's kind of hard to reconcile [userfriendly.org].

Axes to grind ?

The results you get from Google are tweaked by a number of factors, and at the end of the day the company has complete control over what rises to the top

You don't say ! Luckily I like the fact Google does its best to cut out the nonsense spam sites which seem to be intent on swamping the web. Whoever wrote this article seems to me to be a little too concerned about this and makes me suspect he is some kind of spam merchant himself.

Sounds To Me

Sounds to me like Google just made their product/service better is all. Of course Google can control what goes to the top of the search engine - that is what they do. They are "doing no evil" by upgrading and refining their algorithms if anything.

Just because people cannot ghost and bomb their pages to get quick boosts in pagerank does not mean that Google is doing evil, it just means they were never good at their jobs to begin with.

Why is this a problem?

From the rant:

But last week, after years of taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward Googlebombing, Google decided to put an end to the popular sport. It incorporated into its search engine a Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow manages to identify and neutralise any concerted effort to skew search results for a word or phrase.

So um ... they changed pagerank so pages that actually contain a phrase are ranked higher than pages that don't contain the phrase?

Now, given that this originally was their strong point as compared to other search engines, and they picked up many more articles that were useful, yes, it might be a problem. However, you could also say that the simple fact that they used an algorithm that hadn't been gamed by all of the 'search engine optimized' as their real advantage, and there may be an advantage to changing it so that it's a moving target.

I mean, how awful would it be if we actually found the stuff we were looking for when we searched, rather than the search engine spam? If it gives worse results, then it's a problem ... but let's wait and see how it goes, and let the market sort things out.

I see

French Military Victories [google.co.uk] still works. Guess that one really must be objective information.

Amazingly effective

I'm not sure if it qualifies as a Googlebomb because there was no intent to increase page ranking, but I've been astonished at how quickly vandalized Wikipedia pages show up on Google. Considering that most vandalism is removed in minutes, it almost seems that Google's spider sits there and waits for new stuff to pounce on.

By contrast, I administer a MediaWiki installation for a non-profit organization. I get link spam constantly, but that fails to appear on Google. I can only assume the search engine knows about the "real" Googlebomb links and ignores them.

OpenGoogle

Google should expose at least part of their ranking formula as a dead-simple GUI to control parameters to Google users. That way we can control our own "Google" rankings according to our own agendas. People could share their params with friends so we don't have to figure out what to do to be trustworthy, just which of our friends' searching techniques we trust. Just like in the real world.

Doing so would go a long way towards making it less necessary to trust Google. Eventually we would be best served by a totally open ranking client that searches multiple competing backend indices. But if Google handed us "trust web" to do it ourselves, they'd probably preempt that inevitable infomediation that would also disconnect them from the users, and thereby from their highest value relationship.

Careful

You guys will get Slashdot in trouble, what if the Boston police are reading this article?

Obviously

Google is a private company. Its mission is to provide a product that people find useful while making money off advertisement. Google bombs run counter to both purposes, but removing them is obviously not a democratic process. Since domain name system doesn't seem to working for this purpose, I guess we do need a government or non-profit entity providing unbiased search results where each web site will be allowed to register keywords that accurately reflects its purpose and obvious violators are held responsible. This will make sure that commercially unpopular speech can be still found.

Still evil

They are still evil for their encouragement of the Chinese government's censorship and jack-booted press tactics. The Shrubya googlebomb actually gave them a karma point back, and now they've gone and thrown it away.
I choose to search with other sites since they are not only evil, but hypocrites.

Nothing to see here, please move along...

Google's explanation for why they hadn't fixed this in the past was that Googlebombs never displaced useful searches. That is, they didn't get in the way of many people actually trying to find information. The canonical, "miserable failure" example illustrates this -- is there any reason to expect that Google would give you useful hits for that search? I can't think of a reason to use that search that unless you were just curious about what Google would return.

It was clear from Google's release that they considered the Googlebombs a perhaps amusing nuisance, but it wasn't something they supported. Rather, it just wasn't worth the effort of fixing since that effort would be at the cost of other development that they felt would do more to improve user searches.

Now, they found that people were assuming these funny responses were somehow endorsed by Google. They could put up a disclaimer, but a) not many people actually read fine print, and b) many would not believe the disclaimer anyway. Since the Googlebombs didn't actually serve any useful purpose and Google didn't want to be mistaken for endorsing whatever might be inferred from the presence of these odd search results, they did away with it. That's perfectly legitimate.

So, Google really DID claim they were making a minor improvement to their search results through this change, but that wasn't the highest priority. It's not like they've got any particular duty to maintain details of the PageRank algorithm. Further, protecting their image IS an important goal, particularly when it can be done through a means that has a positive impact on the searches. Too bad that a cute Google game is gone, but another one will crop up before long, I'm sure...

This article was shitty and banal.

Here are a few shining turds from TFA:

The company is allowing concerns about its public image to influence the search results it dishes up.

Wow! What the hell motivation do you think Google was built on in the first place? The motivation was to achieve popularity, by being a good search engine. Yes, that's the "public image" they aimed for. So, what changed?

Let's not forget that Google's machine is not our machine. It's Google's, for better or worse.

OMG. Do you actually mean to tell me... I didn't invent Google?

Seriously, the entire lame article was just one big excuse to use the word "salubrious".

Settle down...

So they ensure that the linking text uses words that are consistent with the linked document, before correlating the linking text with the linked document. It might be sophisticated enough for handling synonyms or extracting characteristic words from the document using machine learning. This is a nice iterative improvement to their algorithms. Why is it that every mention of Google induces strong resentment? Google can do no good among so many here. So Google is having its time in the public and press spotlight, get over it. Imagine how crappy the computer industry would be without Google: most critical internet infrastructure would be tied to specific client applications.

"Yahoobombing" still works

See this Yahoobomb [yahoo.com], which faithfully links to the world's number one mostest miserable failure [whitehouse.gov] of all time.

Microsoft's search offering [live.com] (a Billbomb?) only comes up with Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore, at places two and seven respectively, with the rest of the results being links to stories about the Googlebomb as it pertains to that miserable failure [whitehouse.gov].

Past Googlebomb

I can remember a time when Googling "crappy software" resulted in Micro$oft being the first result.

Google controls their own search data

... news at 11!

Wow, Google is able to control the ranking of pages in their own search engine by tweaking their own algorithms? That's a surprise to me!

There is no such evil...

It's impossible that the company has total control of what comes up for every query. There are simply too many queries and too many pages. Anybody who wants to control that needs hundreds of billions of control knobs. Google would need a lot of employees to twist and turn them.

BTW, the suggested approach was tried by AskJeeves and failed. They needed too many editors to edit page ranks per keyword and combinations. And they covered not even 1% of the pages Google covers.

For whom do you speak?

"While the general image of Google is still that it 'does no evil'"

Bullshit [slashdot.org].

People Have Given Google Too Much Power

At least that is my honest opinion.

Gone are the days that people used 99% of their time to work on content. Now in some cases it's 50% content, and 50% kissing Google's ass in some SEO-optimizing obsessive compulsive way to get on the main page.

And it's just one search engine. A search engine with a nearly $100 Billion market capitalization. Who know has a "terms of service" that makes people alter their content to please Google. And people find this sane.

People's 'net worth are now being determined by Google, and people are worried about being "caught" by Google or displeasing Google.

What happened?

10 years ago this would have been seen as an aberration, and people would have thumbed their nose at it. I remember when Google was a cluster of free OS servers that was the alternative to the omni-present Yahoo, and everyone was refreshed by the alternative.

Now look at us. Clamoring to climb to the top of some site page by tweaking our websites in any number of unnatural ways ... and in my opinion, content has suffered because of it. The best content does not always get your site listed the highest, the most "optimized" site does.

And over the years, I have found the searches less and less and less relevant. I know sites that are the authority on their subject that appear on the 10th page because they concentrate only on content instead of wringing their hands over what Google's bot thinks of them.

It's a shame that we have gotten to this point.

I am aware that it sounds like blasphemy, but Google is now probably my 3rd or 4th engine, well behind *gasp* Microsoft's Live Search which seems to crawl much more frequently and update databases much more often.

Google only has as much power as we give it.

I think we have given it far too much.

I think it is negatively impacting content.

This is only my opinion, and I will get off my soapbox now.

I am off to Search Engine Optimize a site of questionable content ... time that could be much better spent by making better content.

Such is the state of the web in 2007.

Re:Google controling what you see? 1984?

Just remember that there are LOTS of other search engines out there. If Google starts to freak you out, or just simply begins to annoy you, you're always free to search elsewhere, too. Then, as other people start to feel similarly, they'll switch to something else as well, ultimately leading to a decrease in popularity of Google. That's the general theory, anyway.

Remember, Google isn't a monopoly on search (far from it). They're just the most popular because they've worked hard at providing their users with relevant results and keeping the interface simple to use. As far as I'm concerned, tweaking an algorithm (not just censoring certain terms) is a welcome improvement that should mitigate cheating the page rank and forcing less relevant/desireable results to the top.