New Campaign Tactic - Google Bombing

jeian writes "My Direct Democracy, a liberal group blog, is trying out a new campaign tactic — Google bombing. From the New York Times article: 'Searching Google for Peter King, the Republican congressman from Long Island, would bring up a link to a Newsday article headlined King Endorses Ethnic Profiling.' Google's policy has typically been to not intervene and let the algorithms work by themselves, but could this change if Google-bombing becomes a common tactic?"

Miserable Failure is the classic example

[xmas2003]

The classic example is a Google Search for miserable failure [google.com] that returns the WhiteHouse.gov biography for George Bush. Not surpisingly, Michael Moore's page also comes up in the first page of results in the tit-for-tat. Read more about how "ugly" Democrats [uglydemocrats.com] and Republicans [uglyrepublicans.com] are using Political Google Bombs at Wikipedia. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Probably not

[davechen]

It's not slander and insulting if it's TRUE.

Yup. All the links in MyDD's google bomb are to news organizations (mostly local newspapers) or Wikipedia. It's not like they're linking to SpreadingSantorum or something.

You can see the links here [mydd.com].

Google won't do anything until ...

[SengirV]

.. this is used against Democrats. AS long as you can find GWB when you search for 'miserable failure', it's A-OK. But once you begin finding Barack Obama when you search for 'style over substance', for example, THEN and only then will Google do something.

Re:Miserable Failure is the classic example

[Captain Splendid]

Can't believe nobody's mentioned Santorum [spreadingsantorum.com] yet.

Santorum - not just for breakfast anymore!

If you RTFA carefully

[benhocking]

Well, if you RTFA carefully (I know), you'll see that it starts with the phrase "If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks," when referring to "Jon Kyl", and "would bring up a link to" for Peter King. The article states what Direct Democracy hopes to happen and not what has already happened. To be fair, I misread it the first time, as well.

Google has a PAC

[funwithBSD]

Google has recently registered a Political Action Committee.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1930008,00. html [guardian.co.uk]

So we will see how they react to it. The claim is that it is for advocating the free distribution of information so it will be interesting to see if they intervene and if they do, how they intervene.