Is Ron Paul the Subject of a Google Bomb?
Type "Most Honest Politician" into Google and "Ron Paul" Content Appears
For those unfamiliar with the term, Wikipedia defines a Google bomb as an effort to improve the ranking of a results page so that the results link with another, unrelated topic "often with humorous or political intentions." In this case, when one types "most honest politician" into Google, "Ron Paul" appears in five of the top ten results.
As the Pew Research Center reports, so-called "Google bombs" have been used in political campaigns before. For example, "miserable failure" was linked to George W. Bush's White House biography. Therefore, when one typed "miserable failure" into Google, George Bush's biography appeared as the first result. Similarly, a search for "waffles" had produced John Kerry's website.
MSNBC discussed the effect of Google bombs in the 2006 election. In the 2006 campaign, both Republican and Democratic bloggers attempted to manipulate Google search results to "force" negative articles about the competition higher in the Google results display. In each of these cases, Google bombs were against the competition instead of trying to directly aid in a certain candidate's campaign.
In 2004, Google's Director of Technology Craig Silverstein told the New York Times that "We're only seeing it (Google bombs) with obscure queries where there's really not that much action on the Web about them. I don't think it's possible to do this sort of thing on queries with well-defined results like ' IBM' So given that it only affects one query out of the more than 200 million a day we handle, it's hard to see it becoming much of a problem."
How easy is it to create a Google bomb? The man who created George Bush's "miserable failure" Google bomb told the New York Times that it took him about six weeks to complete the task of recruiting folks to link web sites to the target site using specific anchor text (i.e. the clickable words in a link). In turn, Google associates the phrase with the target site, even if the phrase isn't shown on the target site.
In somewhat unrelated news, Ron Paul's website states that he plans to visit Google on July 13 during which time he will tour Google's headquarters.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/85/the-internet-and-politics-no-revolution-yet
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34 Comments
Post a Commenthe is the most honest politician hands down. so what is the problem with the searches?
"There is no RP goggle bomb. It is true one gets many returns for "most honest politician" popping up with RP's name attached, but these are due to the headlines (story/page titles), not due to link bombs. All you have to do is type it in and see for yourself.
I suggest printing a retraction/correction."
Yeah, nice try, you flunkies of the Rothchild Skool of Jernalizum!
LOL. Google bomb. Good one. The man has 648,000+ fans on his fb page. His supporters are educated and read all of his material, or at least I do. There's your answer.
LOL. Google bomb. Good one. The man has 648,000+ fans on his fb page. His supporters are educated and read all of his material, or at least I do. There's your answer.
I believe this search result is valid in this case, if the result returned most any other politicians name it would be invalid. "Honest politician" is usually considered an oxymoron.
Ron Paul gets googled a lot because he is the only decint polition, people want to research him on their own because the media is so biased.
If it should happen then I'd have no issue with it considering how the media completely ignores him. He deserves coverage just like anyone else, especially since his campaign isn't financed by big business who buy their candidates' votes.
Right on the wiki page you link to:
"On January 25th, 2007 Google announced on its official Google Webmaster Central blog that they now have "an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs."
Dou some homework and pay attention. Google bombing no longer works because they fixed it about a month ago. Try searching for "miserable failure" and you will see that Georges bio is no longer at the top.
NO. To be a Google bomb the search result would have to be completely unrelated to the keyword(s). For example, "miserable failure" is not part of the official White House bio. Searching "most honest politician" actually yields results with "most honest politician" in the title or text.... online it just happens to be the way Ron Paul is characterized.