Posted on 01/30/2009 8:49:37 AM PST by IrishMike
It took four years for Google to address the "Google bomb" that was lobbed at former President Bush. But it took the Internet behemoth only a few days to defuse the same attack on President Obama.
Four years versus a few days ... Some Googlers are asking why.
In 2003, President Bush's detractors successfully gamed the Google search engine by arranging to have countless Web sites link the words "miserable failure" to Bush's official biography on the White House Web site. The result was that when someone typed the search term "miserable failure" into the Google search box, Bush's bio rose to the top of the search results.
And that's how it stayed until 2007, when Google developed an algorithm to detect what became known as "Google bombs" and re-directed the term "miserable failure" to non-political pages.
Unfortunately for Obama, "miserable failure" reverted back to his bio when he moved into the White House. The new president was also Google-bombed with the phrase "cheerful achievement."
But this time, Google stepped in quickly, rectifying the situation in a few days, instead of four years.
The difference in time did not go unnoticed.
"You let this go on for the entire Bush administration," a reader named w3bgrrl wrote on a Google blog. "But since you bought the White House for Obama, you don't want your candidates harmed … And your claims not withstanding, even liberals know you're liberal."
But another writer, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, gave Google the benefit of the doubt. "I do think many of [Google employees] are liberals but I am also 100% confident that the large majority of them are also very professional people that take the job of creating a good and unbiased search engine very, very seriously," he wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Google has to protect their “investment”...
In fairness, if they needed to develop an algorithm to combat a google bomb, then it would take time up front, but no time at all now.
Uh-huh. Sure.
Regardless, I never got all that excited about the so called bomb. First, it would be weird to type in 'miserable failure' as a search. (Can you say 'miserable loser with too much time on his hands'?)
Second, if someone heard about the bomb and typed it in just to check, they already had an opinion of Bush before they ever did it. It's not like typing that in the search engine and seeing Bush's autobiography on the return was going to suddenly give someone an ephiphany.
Very “Special”
It only took google 3 days to ‘disappear’ half a million hits for ‘obama birth certificate’ back in mid July.
I no longer use google.
“I do think many of [Google employees] are liberals but I am also 100% confident that the large majority of them are also very professional people that take the job of creating a good and unbiased search engine very, very seriously,”....
Bull crap!.....
Yeah, same with journalists.
Sure, they’re liberals, but that doesn’t mean they’re biased!
And Newsweak is a good source of unbiased information.
Here’s one for the libtards and lurkers
....Barack Hussein Obama’s Failure To Produce Birth Certificate Will Lead To Constitutional Crisis.
Should Barack Hussein Obama be discovered to be ineligible for the Office of President of the United States of America and, thereby, his election declared void, Petitioners, as well as other Americans, will suffer irreparable harm in that (a) usurper will be sitting as the President of the United States, and none of the treaties, laws, or executive orders signed by him will be valid or legal,”
Google covers President O's flank (American Thinker January 28, 2009 Thomas Lifson)
Rather than edit these prank results by hand, we developed an algorithm a few years ago to detect Googlebombs. We tend not to run it all the time, because it takes some computing power to process our entire web index and because true Googlebombs are quite rare (we joke around the Googleplex that more articles have been written about Googlebombs than there are actual examples of Googlebombs).After we became aware of this latest Googlebomb, we re-ran our algorithm and it detected the Googlebomb for [cheerful achievement] as well as for [failure]. As a result, those search queries now return discussion about the Googlebombs rather than the original pages that were returned.
Nothing new, they manipulated other results too:
Google washes search results (The Register 012/14/2008 andrew orlowski)
Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance.Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that: The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program...
It wasn't surprising, then, that when five years ago I described how a small, self-selected number of people could rig Google's search results, the reaction from the people doing the rigging was violently antagonistic. Who lifted that rock? they cried.
But what was once Googlewashing by a select few now has Google's active participation.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ... /BLOCKQUOTE>
People were sending out “type this in and ‘check it out’” without telling people what they’d find.
Additioanlly, the pravda media wrote ARTICLES about how Bush was determined to be a “miserable failure” based on web activity.
Bravo Sierra.
I no longer use Google. Been using Dogpile lately. Anyone have a better search engine to suggest?
I’ve switched to Microsoft search for my defaults. I go to Alexa.com, then Yahoo.com, then Google. So, I now only go to Google when the others don’t do well enough.
I’d encourage all of you to do so, too. Don’t use a meta-search engine that hits Google, as they still get the traffic and hits.
If you must use Google, screw with them and use Scroogle.org (Not Scroogle.com, which is a porn site). Scroogle.org removes Google’s ads and doesn’t allow Google to see your system or plant cookies. It basically takes away some of the benefit Google would otherwise receive.
I haven't used Google in years and don't miss it. There are many excellent search engines out there. I use Clusty and Dogpile. Why empower the enemy?
Yeah, four years for them when all they needed to do was delete the one reference. They delete other sites, why not that one?
Get real. They aren’t that stupid or innocent.
we can start another one for them to squelch
Big Oops. I see now that both Dogpile and Clusty are meta-search engines and may access Google as part of their search. Does anyone know of a good, clean (google-free) search engine?
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