The New York Times reports on a concerted effort by liberal bloggers to move negative stories about Republicans into higher spots on results pages in Google. This practice is negatively called “Google Bombing” – it is an extreme example of what’s known as search engine optimization (SEO) – which is a way of cross-linking and setting up content so that a search engine sees the content and ranks it more highly in a search result.
It will be harder to manipulate results for searches of the name of a candidate who has already been widely covered in the news and widely discussed in the blogosphere, because so many links and so many pages already refer to that particular name. Search results on lesser-known candidates, with a smaller body of references and links, may be easier to change.
“We don’t condone the practice of Google bombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results,” said Ricardo Reyes, a Google spokesman. “A site’s ranking in Google’s search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.”
If you’re wondering why I put a picture of Cleopatra Jones on this entry, well…it’s because that photo came up during a Google Image search on “Jon Kyl,” a senator from my home state of Arizona who is one of the targets of this Google Bomb campaign. It’s a better visual than a guy in a suit, no?
