Jul
16
2003

googling wmd

This has been already passed around/discussed to death, but I’m posting about it here anyway because it amuses me.

If you go to Google, type “weapons of mass destruction,” and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button underneath, you’ll be taken to an error page. Said error page looks just like a regular “404 Not Found” page — but with a few differences.

It’s funny how something as innocuous as an Internet link — Google’s stock in trade — can become a form of political speech.

Posted at 8:15 AM in current events

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More fun with Google:

Type “miserable failure” in the search box and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. You’ll be taken to President George W. Bush’s bio page at whitehouse.gov.

(Thanks to Jessica, by way of Rob, for the link.)

Posted by alykat on December 5, 2003 4:45 PM

All this, courtesy of a little thing called “Google bombing.” The New York Times has a long write-up about it today. (I wonder how long this story has been sitting in the queue?) (“Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point” - 01/22/04)

The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through “Google bombing,” or manipulating the Web’s search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.

The perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link). The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president’s official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site.

“I’m actually surprised how easy it was to do,” said the mastermind of the Bush effort, George Johnston, 46, a computer programmer in Bellevue, Wash., who writes a liberal-leaning Web log called Old Fashioned Patriot (oldfashionedpatriot.blogspot.com). “It took about six weeks to get Bush’s biography as the No. 1 result. I had no idea when I started that I’d get people all over the world involved.”

Posted by alykat on January 22, 2004 10:09 AM

They’re at it again. This time, reports Wired, conservatives are trying to Google-bomb the word “waffles” to lead back to John Kerry. The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, has purchased AdWords text ads on Google keyed to the word “waffles,” advising folks to “read about President Bush’s Waffles.” (“Kerry Gets Google-Bombed” - 05/24/04) It’s a rather smart idea on the part of the Kerry folks, I think.

Posted by alykat on June 1, 2004 1:06 AM

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