Friday 2 February 2007

Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm

I like the way that sounds like Noam Chomsky's 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'.

It's taken from Nicholas Carr's article yesterday for the Guardian's tech section, which talks about Google's introduction of an algorithm to its search engine that will stop Googlebombing - the practice that lead to that exciting-at-the-time phenomena where you could type 'miserable failure' into Google and get sent to George Bush's White House site.

Read me first - Guardian website


In his article, Carr notes that Google has done this not to make the web a better world, but to protect its image:

"One of the company's top engineers, Matt Cutts, explained the move on a Google blog: 'Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.'"

An interesting thread of comments on the article has started on Slashdot

Defused Googlebombs may backfire- Slashdot

No comments: