Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Google Bombs...
I read an interesting piece in The Hindu about something called Google bombs.
Try searching for the keywords "miserable failure" on Google and the first result you see is President Bush's official biography from the White House!! This is despite the fact that those two words are not in the biography at all! Such results where the keywords bear no direct relation to the website in question are called Google Bombs. This particular bomb was started by a fellow blogger, George Johnston who first linked the bio in his blog to the words. He then asked others to join him in the bombing and, not surprisingly, some have indeed done so.
Google bombing occurs because of the way Google tracks web pages and asociates them to key words. If enough Web pages link a certain Web page to a phrase, the Google search engine will start to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of Bush's official biography, the phrase does not occur on the destination Web site. And it doesn't even take large numbers to pull off this prank - in Bush's case, of more than 800 pages that linked to Bush's official bio, only 32 actually linked it to the words!
I guess enough gyaan for now. It is amazing in how many ways the World Wide Web can be used. From the days of bloody revolutions to peaceful protests, we in the Computer Age keep evolving a really peaceful, legitimate and completely democratic forms of protest at the same time evoking some laughs. I am going to link the words to the site myself...three cheers to Google!!
PS: I thank The Hindu, The New York Times, BBC News for the inputs I got about Google Bombing and also the names and figures quoted above.
Words of the Day: Miserable Failure....:D
Try searching for the keywords "miserable failure" on Google and the first result you see is President Bush's official biography from the White House!! This is despite the fact that those two words are not in the biography at all! Such results where the keywords bear no direct relation to the website in question are called Google Bombs. This particular bomb was started by a fellow blogger, George Johnston who first linked the bio in his blog to the words. He then asked others to join him in the bombing and, not surprisingly, some have indeed done so.
Google bombing occurs because of the way Google tracks web pages and asociates them to key words. If enough Web pages link a certain Web page to a phrase, the Google search engine will start to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of Bush's official biography, the phrase does not occur on the destination Web site. And it doesn't even take large numbers to pull off this prank - in Bush's case, of more than 800 pages that linked to Bush's official bio, only 32 actually linked it to the words!
I guess enough gyaan for now. It is amazing in how many ways the World Wide Web can be used. From the days of bloody revolutions to peaceful protests, we in the Computer Age keep evolving a really peaceful, legitimate and completely democratic forms of protest at the same time evoking some laughs. I am going to link the words to the site myself...three cheers to Google!!
PS: I thank The Hindu, The New York Times, BBC News for the inputs I got about Google Bombing and also the names and figures quoted above.
Words of the Day: Miserable Failure....:D
