Reader Larwyn told me that if I enter the word “failure” into Google I would get President Bush’s biography page listed as the first result and that if I entered “liar” I would get Tony Blair’s. Of course I had to try it and sure enough, that is the result I got. I remember a slew of these “Google Bombs” a while back, with some liberal bloggers organizing to manipulate the results of Google searches. I still don’t understand exactly how Google works, but I thought something had been done to the system to make such manipulation more difficult. Evidently, it has not.
More at Gateway Pundit.
Given in the last presidential election 98% of Google’s employees donated to Democrats and Google’s penchant for purging conservative news sites from its hand-picked Google News service, as long as the Google Bombs weigh more heavily against conservatives not much effort will be extended in eliminating them. If, however, their service was being manipulated to mock and ridicule liberals and democrats more, I bet they’d find a solution.
I dunno, searches for “French Military Victories” still goes to http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/victories.html .
I suspect that Google tries to be pretty hands off in pruning and shaping their search results; it could be absolutely devastating to their business if they are revealed to be partisan and partial.
Certainly their news.google.com service stinks on ice- the idiot that thought alternet was a good source should be fired- but I doubt that this level of idiocy would be allowed in their bread and butter.
FWIW, the real coders at google (not the marketing droids and support staff) are far more likely to skew libertarian that democrat or republican- that’s very common in Linux / Unix culture.
And THAT link is nothing more than out-and-out theft from Bigwig of Silflay Hraka, and his brilliant “Hoist By Their Own Petain” posting http://www.silflayhraka.com/archives/2003/01/hoist_by_their_own_petain.html.
I think I’ll tell Bigwig about it…
J.
The nofollow tags used here and on many other blogs on links in comments aren’t exactly helping the cause. If you aren’t familiar with that now-almost-admitted-to-have-failed poison pill that most bloggers swallowed, read this: homelandstupidity.us/2005/05/23/nofollow-revisited
Lets see here. You think that a company that is helpping to repress free speech in China is likely to have a problem with manipulated search results that poke fun at Bush or Blair? Lorie, your starting to think like a liberal. How the world should be rather than dealing with reality.
If you feel you have a biased search on Google over a current issue, take a screen shot of it. Often it isn’t long that biased searches get somehow magically fixed when they begin to get public attention. Which then makes the person complaining about it look like they are imagining it.
Althought the Bush, Blair, and French thing have become fixtures and at some level have to do with outside manipulation.
I haven’t “googled” anything in years. There are plenty of other, better search engines out there. I don’t use any google products at all (toolbars, etc.).
If they want to cater to less than 20% of the population (the left wing) then they should be happy only getting 1/5 of the business that they could otherwise get if they were honest.
Don, as someone who has to live under Blair’s government, I can assure you he’s no conservative!
#4 on the failure list is Michael Moore – so I don’t think that Google is that biased.
Search for “waffles” and JohnKerry.com comes up 5th — it was 1st during the election.
Yahoo! search gives the same result (#2, anyway), and probably others, but using that term at Ask.com gives only one reference to Bush, and that is a BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3298443.stm from December 2003 addressing the same issue.
Funny, on Yahoo it’s 3rd and on MSN it’s 7th. Guess there are thousands and thousands and thousands of those liberal dem bloggers spending thousands and thousands and thousands of hours manipulating search engines when in reality they don’t have to. The result speaks for itself.
Wikipedia says that the “failure” Google bomb is old news, and lists over 50 more Google Bombs including some of the ones mentioned in above comments.
As controversies go, this one is strictly slow news day material.
Ah, Mike, I think I mentioned that in the post didn’t I? Could have sworn I did. The thing that surprised me was that after all this time, the bombs still stand. I thought they had been addressed by Google long ago, but evidently they have not. I think I said that in the post, too.
Hugh,
Exaggerate much?
It doesn’t take ‘thousands and thousands’ of anyone to google bomb, and this isn’t a phenomenon centered around Bush.
Please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
btw – I thought you repented from your Bombastic ways.
I wrote a bit about Google search & e-mail and censoring here:
http://www.weswear.ws/archives/000609.html
Sheik…my friend…..my friend…..my friend….my friend……it was just an attempt at a little humor….a little humor…..a little humor….a little….humor – except of course my last sentence (which I vehemently deny is bombastic).
hugh