Anonymous Blasts Scientology.org With a Google Bomb

A group of hackers calling themselves 'Anonymous' have recently created world-wide buzz by publicly declaring war against Scientology. The war started with a video on Youtube in which Anonymous declared (among other things) that they would "...systematically dismantle the church of Scientology in its present form."(1) Anonymous' latest volley is a Google bomb, a manipulation of the search engine's results. The top ranked result when searching the for the phrase 'dangerous cult' on Google is scientology.org.

This is not the first time Google has been used for political protest. Perhaps the most famous target of Google bombing was George W. Bush. During a span in 2003, the top result for the word 'failure' or the phrase 'miserable failure' on Google as well as several other major search engines was Mr. Bush's biography.(2) Bush was also targeted by Google bombers when a search for the phrase 'weapons of mass destruction' was bombed to take searchers to a fake '404' not found error page.

Not all Google bombs have been politically motivated. One of the earliest Google bombs (set off by Adam Mathes) caused the words 'talentless hack' to bring back a link to a friend's homepage. Perhaps the most ironic Google bomb ever set off was targeted at Google itself. For a time, the top result for 'Out of Touch Executives' brought back a link to Google's corporate information page.(3)

Never ones to let a trick pass unexploited, spammers have often tried to craft Google bombs to rocket their products to the top of the search heap. Also known as spamdexing, a promoter will often post links to a site and the phrases that they want to be associated with said site on the same forum. This creates a false impression of relevancy for the pre-selected search terms, thus bringing back the promoter's site when those phrases are entered into search engine queries.(4)

Despite their varied targets and agendas, all search engine bombs work off the same basic principal. In order to get the top result, bombers must fool the search engine into thinking that a particular site is the best answer for the term in question. This is done by planting the keyword or phrase in links to the desired site in as many places as possible. Would-be bombers will associate their target word or phrase with the desired link on as many blogs, social media outlets, and homepages as possible.

Think of it this way: If you ask five hundred people where the best place to get a cheeseburger is and 400 of them answer "Mike's Cheesy Burger," you are likely to believe them. Of course, if you notice that most of those people are wearing "Mike's Cheesy Burger" name tags, you might get a little suspicious. This is the popularity contest part of how a search engine algorithm works.

Sophisticated search engines like Google don't rely on just the raw number of links. They try to check for name tags. Understandably, Google keeps its exact methods hush hush, but it's public knowledge that their PageRank technology plays a big role in their defense against manipulators. (5) The PageRank (and similar technologies employed by other search engines) allows Google to say that not all links are equal. Sites with a higher PageRank for a given term are given higher weight. If the South Eastern Burger Munching Champion tells you "Mike's Cheesy Burger" is great, that probably carries more weight than the opinion of the head of the local Vegan Lifestyle group.

While Anonymous may or may not achieve their goal of destroying Scientology, they are likely to succeed in bringing new awareness to the power of media manipulation.

1) http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-01/25/content_7495986.htm
2) http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/google.asp
3) http://www.linksandlaw.com/technicalbackground-google-bombing.htm
4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank