Google Bombing

OK, if you don’t believe what you see, try this before reading on, go to http://www.google.com/ and type “miserable failure” in the search box. The first result will be a link to biography George W Bush.

This is called “Google Bombing”.

So, How The Hell Does it work?..
A Google bombing is attempted to influence the ranking of page, for given query, in the results returned by Google. The technique takes advantage of PageRank technology. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started by working on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. This is the stepping stone of the PageRank technology. Google defines Page Rank as …

“PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.”

Now don’t bore me anubhav….

Ok, in simple terms, for example in our case of “miserable failure” if they are many sites which link to Bush’s biography under the name “miserable failure” then his biography(site) gets the top rank for the query “miserable failure” even if the site does not have the term “miserable failure”.

Frankly speaking in itself PageRank is a great Technology, but as the say “For every crack there is a Hack” …. We have Google bombing.

Apart from spoofing on famous people, Google bombing can also be used for commercial purposes to upgrade a rank of your own site.

So how do I Bomb Google…

The most common way of doing this, create many blogs having links pointing to particular site.

Google Bombs (those for meant humor) are self destructible, because when they become famous, they find a note in many web journals and articles on various websites and the bomb is knocked out of it’s top spot.


Some famous Google Bombs…..

1. “Weapons of mass destruction” - Internet Explorer Error look-alike joke page saying "weapons of mass destruction cannot be found".

2. “French military victories” - hoax, Google look-a-like page saying "no results found for French military victories, did you mean French military defeats (hey this one still works).

3. “Miserable failure”, “worst president”, and “great president” - whitehouse.gov biography of George W. Bush.

4. “"More evil than Satan " returned Microsoft's home page: This was one of first bombs, but doesn’t work this days.

They are many more but these are the more famous ones.