A New Campaign Tactic and The Foolish Mob

(NY Times) Fifty or so other Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated “Google bombing” campaign intended to game the search engine’s ranking algorithms. By flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.

I wrote recently about my reservations about the great new offering by Google to provide an authoritative election guide. The information in this guide is of course based upon the Google index, an item that folks have proven can be externally manipulated.

Google has such great confidence in the robustness of their database that they are unwilling to take steps to correct obvious manipulations.

We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.

Chris Bowers, the man behind this latest effort, justifies his Googlebombing plan, “I think Internet users are very smart and most are aware of what a Google bomb is,” he said, “and they will be aware that results can be massaged a bit.”

Of course his assumption that the public is generally smart enough to see through such deceptions is flawed, as is Google's assumption that it is ok to allow such deceptions to stand without correction.

There is another way to view this - these sort of deceptions are what they are, just an extension of dirty politics into the digital world. We could ask for Google to police their index but in doing so we are asking for editorial leeway. Clearly this is not the way we really want things to go.

The Internet opens up a window into the darkest side of "democracy", if deceptions and tricks like this work -and they do - it proves that the mob is not really qualified to make decisions.

Michelle Malkin offers a list of other left-wing Googlebombing attempts.

Other stupid, left-wing Google bomb campaigns:

Google bombing "The Path to 9/11"

Google bombing Bush and "miserable failure"

Google bombing Rick Santorum

Google bombing me!