Google kills the political Googlebomb - well, unless you are French

Whilst there has been a lot of talk about it in search and tech circles, nobody in the mainstream press has picked up much yet on the fact that a few days ago Google announced that it had killed the "Googlebomb". Or, at least, in their own words minimized 'the impact of many Googlebombs'.

One of the most enduringly popular posts on this site was about how people perceived the "Googlebomb" when searching for 'weapons of mass destruction' to have been something clever or funny that Google had done themselves. At the time I ascribed it to the Google brand halo effect.

The demise of the Googlebomb hasn't warranted many column inches, although the rise of it did. The 'first' Googlebomb, 'talentless hack', got a BBC News story of its own in March 2002, with a link through to the search results themselves. The following year George W. Bush's Googlebomb treatment got another story, although no longer did the BBC link directly to the search results.

In their announcement about trying to end the phenomena, Google's Webmaster Central blog said:

"over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs."

They go on to say they haven't edited the results by hand, they've implemented an algorithm. They also say:

"We wouldn't claim that this change handles every prank that someone has attempted. But if you are aware of other potential Googlebombs, we are happy to hear feedback in our Google Web Search Help Group."

But I can't help feeling they might have tested the algorithm a bit more before announcing it, seeing as how it may have fixed the search engine reputations of the leaders of the U.S.A. and the UK, but it doesn't seem to have done anything for the reputation of the French military, victims of one of the most famous Googlebombs of all. Are Matt Cutts and co really saying they didn't know about the "French military victories" Googlebomb?

Perhaps someone should let the Google Web Search Help Group know about it?

Posted by Martin Belam, January 30, 2007
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