What does Googlebombing mean? How does it affect IT? Can it affect the integrity of website searches? Should search engines have the ethical responsibility to restore / correct the rubble the Googlebomb causes? Let's look into this facinating new word I learned today.
According to Wikipedia, Googlebombing is "the attempt to influence the ranking of a given sites returned by the Google search engine.... a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistant anchor text". To me, in layman's terms, it means that people have a process put together to change the order of listings that the search engine displays, even if the listings do not contain the text of the search strings. Google does not suffer from these misrepresentations alone: Yahoo and Ask Jeeves also are exposed to these attacks.
I stumbled across Googlebombing when I saw an article about searching on the text "miserable failure" and it brought up George Bush's biography from the official White House website. My political views aside, I did not find the expression "miserable failure" in his webpage, yet Google things that the expression is there.
Doing some other reasearch, I have found other examples: "litigious bastards" gives the website of SCO Group, the people who have caused ripples in the Linux community trying to copyright parts of the Linux Kernel. A humorous example was "International Sign for Choking" which brought up the images of the Philadelphia Eagles football team. There were also a numberous amount of swear word sites displayed linking to various political and religious groups; I need not repeat them here.
How does Googlebombing affect IT? I think in a very serious matter, because we already know that search engines have a monitary value... if you type in a part name trying to find a vendor, then all bets are off on who earns the chance to compete for the sale. Long gone are the innocent days of the web being a pure idealistic information source: the web makes money, and things that make money are now heavily competed for. One does not have to think very hard that IT has to do all it can to compete, and try to keep the tables fair. If this means investigating on how to set off an intentional "googlefirecracker", I wonder how many companies are seriously looking into how to get away with it.
Can Googlebombing affect the quality of website searches? You Bet! Expanding on the idea just presented, the first click could get the sale. What if this Googlebombing gets out of control, and we start seeing problems along the lines of spam -- where we need to now start filtering what is presented to us, or just discarding the whole bunch of wax? I think that algorithm specialists and other people deep in computation science theory should develop a model on what could happen if this gets out of control. I am a firm believer in fair competition, but know that my idealist hope that this will repair itself will not be fulfilled.
Should websites like Google be compelled to repair Googlerubble (my word for a site that has been Googlebombed?) I strongly believe so. I believe search engines should be completely objective and without influence. For example, some may think that George Bush is a failure, but we can prove without doubt that the search string does not belong on the site. I think that Google, and other search engines, must fulfill the ethical obligations of keeping the search results as pure and correct as possible. Otherwise, cyberslander could get wildly out of control. Without the corrections, search engines like Google run risk of being accused of having a political bias, or supporting a certain political movement or idealism. Google's Director of consumer products, Marissa Mayer, commented that "We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up."
My reply is that if Google is providing a product (search results), and want them to reflect society's integrity, then they should modify them by hand. Unfortunately, they could be opening themselves up to a massive expensive hands-on management of the database.
Certainly, these instances of Googlebombing that I have discovered will not prevent me from using the search engine services. But it will certainly make me thing why people would want to do such a thing, and make me ponder obligations of being as accurate as possible.