OddThoughts

I came across and interesting entry the other day over at geekyspeaky regarding what is known as a “Google Bomb” at the time (Feb5th) when you did a search for the phrase “Dangerous Cult” the top result returned was to the Scientology.org website. It doesn’t seem to work now and unfortunately, I didn’t take a screen cap, but it did work when Colleen posted it and I found this quite fascinating.

I did some research and found that the idea of Google Bombing is actually quite simple, and has been around for quite a long time. It is based on the ‘popularity’ algorithm that Google uses to match key words/phrases with websites. So for example, if everyone with a website / blog suddenly linked to the scientology websites with the phrase “Dangerous Cult”. The google engine happily matches that keyword with the referenced site, and returns it in the top results.

Here is a screen cap I found where people did just this for the term “miserable failure”

And that’s all there really is to it. It does seem that Google keeps track of these, or that the algorithm changes as needed because an interesting results page one day does not gaurentee to stay that way the next day, but it is very interesting indeed.

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