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.