No more Google bombing?

Filed in archive Spam News on February 28, 2007

Sometimes called 'easter eggs', prank bombs exist in most of today's software. A good example of online pranks is the one about Mozilla (just type about:mozilla in your Firefox browser). But, there are also search pranks, which can make less knowledgeable internet users confused or even offended. The most delightable search prank was the one where you enter search term 'miserable failure' and get back interesting results involving the current US president.

Information week reports:

"Google has improved its analysis of the link structure of the Web to defuse such bombs. Using Google-bombed keywords now generally returns links pointing to news sites discussing the Google bomb rather than the target site.
In the past, the company dismissed Google bombing, but it changed its position to prevent the perception that its search results exhibit bias. "Over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries," explained Matt Cutts, head of Google's Web spam team, in a blog post."

Which means that miserable failure is no longer there for your enjoyment.

So, there shouldn't be any more Google bombs...in English at least. I have recently seen a good one in German and some in French, so it seems that Google is only concerned for the English search.