Google Bombing - A New Secret Internet Weapon That People are Using

During the New York State Gubernatorial election, I worked for the Eliot Spitzer campaign and I became wrapped up in politics. On Election night, I was checking each of the Senate races across the nation to see if the balance of power in the Senate would shift to the Democrats. When I was looking at the Senate race featuring Jim Webb, I decided to go to the google.com website to find out more information about the Democratic candidate. What I found was somewhat disturbing and a product of the rise in technology. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party as well I'm sure, have been utilizing a technique over the web called Google bombing. I'll explain what that means.

Google bombing involves the writing of an article about a political candidate or topic that is completely negative. The way that the Google website works is that the articles which have the most amount of keywords that match your search are put at the top of the list of searches. As a result, when you click search after you have typed in your keywords, the first several search results that you get are negative articles about a candidate.

I was actually shocked to learn that people get paid to Google Bomb for political campaigns. Not many people know this little fact but Google bombing might actually help candidates. The internet reaches millions of people and Google is one of the busiest sites on the web. People who browse the web in search of information about a candidate don't realize that they are reading information which is biased against that candidate and in most cases not true at all. Rumors are spread about a candidate using Google bombing and when a candidate makes a mistake during his campaigns, Google bombers all over the country have a field day with it.

Google bombing doesn't involve much creativity and practically anyone with a computer and the internet can get paid to Google bomb.

In all fairness to the Google website, they have been working to fix these series o f Google bombing. Google is constantly updating their web pages and if they realize that Google bombing has been going on about a particular topic, they will take those results off the search results. However, with hundreds of thousands of articles published on Google and with that total rising each day, Google has great difficulty in regulating their search engine and Google bombing often works with much success.