Defusing Google bombs
Google claims to have eradicated Google bombs by tweaking their algorithms.
For those who don't know, Google bombing is a specific case of a larger set of hacks called "search engine bombing" that attempt to influence the results of search engines through manipulation, usually by a large amount of false entries placed in such a way that the engine's indexer is likely to run across them and interpret them as widespread evidence of popularity.
Fundamentally Google-like search engines are statistical tinker toys. Before Google, the best engines were boolean and used various probabilistic algorithms to increase the "precision" of a search by looking for the presence of each of the terms in the query and then applying mathematical operators to combine the results based on the nature of the Boolean connective (eg AND, OR). Google works very differently, however. They rate a document as more highly relevant if more external websites link to it.
Because of this approach, it's not hard to spoof Google. Implanting links to the victim's website and associating the links with the desired key words on a dozen or so sites should do it. The company terms Google Bombing a "prank", but that's a little arrogant. Google, like candid photography, works best when people forget about their voyeurism. Whenever anyone "apes for the camera", it throws off the legitimacy of the results.
There are several well-known cases of Google bombing, many detailed in the linked Wikipedia article. Probably the most well-known was having the term "miserable failure" link to the official George W. Bush website.
In their announcement, Google says that they will weigh the discussion of google bombing higher than the bomb itself and a search of "miserable failure" seems to confirm this.
So. Although they needed to do something like this to confirm the public's faith in their results, it's futile and arrogant.
Futile because there's always going to be ways to get around Google. What they've done is to throw down the glove and challenge far too many hackers with far too much free time on their hands to work around this latest fix. And make no mistake--someone will hack the system and soon.
Google is arrogant because they seem to think that there's something special about what they're doing. They were the right approach at the right time and everyone involved with the company has been rewarded beyond most of our wildest dreams, but that doesn't make them valuable, immutable or eternal. Okay, valuable maybe. The road to technology hell is littered with the skulls of good company ideas. In many respects, Google is a multi-billion dollar parlor trick and it's getting hokier as they "tweak" their engine for special cases. Eventually they will be a patchwork of special case code that even's whorier than Microsoft's operating systems.
Posted on January 29, 2007
