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The Google Bomb is Dead....Long Live Google Bomb 2.0

by Tim Stevens on July 28, 2008 at 11:26 AM

The Google Bomb is Dead, Long Live the Google BombThough it may sounds like some sort of cyber-terrorist action, a Google bomb is pretty harmless -- it's more like a game than any sort of digital explosion. It's a concerted effort by a number of people online to convince Google that a certain term should be linked to a certain page, which exploits the search behemoth's own algorithms to their advantage. Just ask Stephen Colbert, who managed to get himself declared "World's greatest living American" -- at least as far as Google was concerned anyway. Now, though, Google is putting an end to the fun, saying it has fixed the problem -- or has it?

In the old days, all you had to do was get a couple-hundred people to link to the same page with the same phrase and, presto, you had a Google bomb (in other words, your page would pop up as the first result when someone searched for that phrase). With Google's tweaks, however, that kind of search result is supposedlu no longer possible, but bloggers (particularly of the political bent) have found a way around the fixes already. These folks are making concerted efforts to link to a set of articles with similar themes and similar titles, which increases the Google relevance of those articles and sends them up to the top of search results.

They're calling it Google Bomb 2.0, so we think Google perhaps has some more work to do. [Source: The Trail]

Tags: google, google bomb, GoogleBomb, hackers, search, security, web

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