http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/defuse-googlebomb/

This blog post links to previous posts about googlebombs, and then talks about Google’s approach to detecting and managing them.

A googlebomb is a prank, where many people create links to a webpage with an unintended description of the page in the hopes of getting a search for that description to return that webpage as the top result. The most famous googlebomb is probably the one for President Bush. A search for “miserable failure” on Google used to return the official White House web page for President Bush and more recently President Obama. This blog post specifically is about Google’s ability to automatically detect and deal with googlebombs. They use two algorithms, one to detect googlebombs, and one to diminish their impact in queries. The second algorithm is always running and the first one only runs a handful of times a year, since it has to process Google’s entire web index.

So far this seems to be a relatively effective approach for Google as many googlebombs such as the “miserable failure” one now display normal results (often webpages that discuss the googlebombs). Although they are called googlebombs, these pranks affect almost every search engine. Yahoo does not yet seem to have attempted to account for googlebombs as a search for “miserable failure” returns as its top two results President Obama’s and President Bush’s homepages. It is debatable whether or not googlebombs should be accounted for, though.

I think the topic of googlebombing is extremely relevant to what we are currently learning about, since these “pranksters” are using their knowledge of common web search algorithms to affect page ranks. In class we have learned that the number of in links to a certain page with a certain tag is an important factor in page rank. Yet, we also learned that hub quality is important, and it is likely in this case that the in links would not becoming from quality hubs, as most reputable sites probably would not participate in a googlebomb. However, googlebombs are made on general somewhat meaningless phrases and they therefore usually do not have that much competition for page rank.

It seems that competition for page rank is going to be a long term battle, as both businesses and average people try to abuse their knowledge of web search algorithms, while search engines like Google try to maintain “true” results.