XKCD Inadvertently Causes Googlebomb

MrCopilot writes "As I noted yesterday (and was joined by many others)... in an offhand observation xkcd has singlehandedly changed a small section of the Internet. Changing the results from a Google search for "Died in a Blogging Accident" from 2 to (at this writing) over 7,170 in a little more than 24 hours." If you aren't reading xkcd, you're missing out.

Re:And this is just adding to it

[teslar]

Heresy. Anything related to one of the sites which are lucky enough to earn their own link on the main page of /. is always /.-worthy.

Also, the concept that observing any property of the internet within the internet can affect that property is interesting. If the choice is between reflecting on that or finishing that bloody piece of code I'm writing, I'll take the former, even if it may ultimately be pointless ;)

Practical idea

[mapkinase]

Jews write "G-d" instead of "God". It's their thing.

May be we should try to write in metaquotes about google searches, modifying quoted search phrases...

Not just death by blogging

[Fear the Clam]

My wife showed me the "killed in a knitting accident" part, which was causing much mayhem in the ravelry [ravelry.com] knitting and crochet site.

This is what's wrong with Google.

[a_nonamiss]

What I find most interesting is now, after the "Googlebomb" try looking at some of the links that come up. More than half in the first few pages are the scum-sucking lowlife advertising sites. Clearly what they're doing is monitoring the "hot Google searches" and then googlepimping© their own sites to match those searches. Everybody knows this is going on, but the efficiency at which these people monitored Google searches, noticed that a particular search was popular, then got their own sites listed really surprises and frightens me. Google is fundamentally broken.

Died in a * accident

[kasperd]

Google will actually let you search for Died in a * accident [google.com]. If you do so you can see what words people put in there. Right now the fourth result is actually "Died in a blogging accident" (right after three car accidents). I have used that to find out what might be the missing word in other sentences like Grab your * and double click [google.com] or Either you are with us or you are with the * [google.com]. Even more interesting if combined with the - operator to filter [google.com] out the obvious possibilities.

It's due to the death in China and Digg

[ckedge]

It's because of this:

      http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/01/11/china.blogger/index.html [cnn.com]

and also this:

      http://www.digg.com/world_news/Blogger_Beaten_to_Death_in_China_for_Filming_Argument [digg.com] ..where someone point out that "xkcd's coming wasn't quite so funny any more" but did not provide a direct link.

I can't believe I'm the first one to point this out!

Re:Died in a * accident

[Yetihehe]

Heh, actually for "Either you are with us..." fifth result is your post, talk about metasearches :D

Re:I take exception

[x_MeRLiN_x]

I don't follow XKDC, but it didn't take me long to find out this has happened before.

This comic [xkcd.com] spawned a whole different type of [art|softcore pornography] [wetriffs.com]. If you accept the warning and scroll to the bottom you'll see proof of how wrong you are. If you're thinking that these events aren't the same because WetRiffs and XKCD are apparently operated by the same person, you should see that thousands [google.co.uk] did mention WetRiffs on their web log.

By the way, 33% of your post was misspelt.

WHAT WERE THE TWO RESULTS?

[exhilaration]

Damn it, why hasn't anyone asked what the original two results were? Is it even possible to get that information anymore?

Re:The original Google Bomb is a VERY bad thing

[arkhan_jg]

SEO IS bad for users of search engines. It means that when I search for something, I don't get relevant links to what I asked for, but instead some spammers latest scam.
This applies to all search engines gamed by SEO users, not just google.

You also forget, commercial speech is not protected speech under free speech laws. SEO Advertising is NOT free speech, it's an attempt to subvert the normal function of the web for commercial advantage of a particular user. I'm not required to read it, and neither is google required to index it.

What's your next suggestion, mail server admins shouldn't perform any spam filtering as its infringing on the "free speech" rights of the spammers? Free speech means the government won't censor you, not that it won't punish you for illegal speech, and it has nothing to do with commercial speech or the interactions between non-government people and companies.