1. Introduction
In the first question of assignment 3, we had an opportunity to derive multiple formulas and learn the process of spam farm. It doesn’t look really hard to implement in real life, so you may have wondered how we could apply it in practice, or if there are any real-world applications for it. In fact, one of the most representative applications is the “link bombing”, also known as “Google Bombing”.
2. What is “Google Bombing”?
Before we introduce the bomb, we could first have a look at google’s ranking algorithm for searching. Google’s search-ranking algorithm ranks pages higher for particular search phrases if enough other pages are linked to it using similar anchor text (linking text such as “miserable failure”). Does this sound familiar? In fact, this is just almost the idea we had with PageRank, with some minor updates according to their actual situations.
We could easily tell from A3 that one may boost a page’s rank by attaching a bunch of boosting pages to it, and we proved that it is going to increase the page rank of the target page. This is how “google bombing” works —- it is aimed at creating a high search result for a Web page. Specific keywords are chosen to make a statement – political, humorous, or otherwise – about the Web page that is displayed (target page). And since Google’s search-rank algorithm ranks pages higher for a particular search phrase if enough other pages linked to it use a similar link label. Then when these keywords are entered as a search query, the targeted Web page becomes the top result (as we saw from the idea of the PageRank algorithm). For example, if we buy many domains, and all link them to a page with the text “CSCC46 is a good course”, even if the target page (CSCC46) does not have the text “is a good course”, google will still list it at the top when someone searches “a good course”. This is just the same idea as we saw in the spam farm question.
3. One of the Most Famous “Google Bombing”
Some of the most famous Google bombs are usually expressions of political opinions, and among all these, the search query on “miserable failure” could be claimed as the most famous one, mainly because if we search “miserable failure” now, it is still not showing the tactic meaning of it.
Below is an example of the Google Bombing in 2006 that caused the search query “miserable failure” to be associated with George W. Bush and Michael Moore
4. Current Situation – Google’s response
Although in 2007, Google changed its indexing structure so that Google bombs such as “miserable failure” would “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself and announced the changes on its official blog. But still, when we search “miserable failure” now (link, try it yourself), we will see an interesting phenomenon that this link points to the wiki of Google Bombing instead of the general idea. Also, the head of Google’s Webspam team, said that Google bombs had not “been a very high priority for us”.
Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.
—- Matt Cutts, Head of Google Webspam Team
After Google’s announcement, many users noticed changes in the Google algorithm. These changes largely affected (among other things) Google bombs: as of February 15, 2007, only roughly 10% of the Google bombs still worked. This change was largely due to Google refactoring its valuation of PageRank. However, interestingly, we still could see many Google bombs working, especially on politics, for example searching “idiot” in July 2018 gives us results on “Donald Trump”, allowing people to think about who is making all these link bombs.
Bibliography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing
“Miserable failure – Google Search“. Archived from the original on June 21, 2015.
“Miserable failure – Google Search“. Archived from the original on November 22, 2022.
One reply on “PageRank in Google Bombing”
Interesting piece of internet history! Thank you for sharing with us. Little suprised to know that this is still a thing even in 2018, seems that there will always be people finding loopholes of the indexing system.