Scientology and Search Bombs

With all of the controversy surrounding Scientology, much of it fed by the backlash against Tom Cruise, it's no surprise that search bombers, more commonly known as "Google bombers" are hard at work. Due to their sustained effort and knowhow, you will find that when you conduct a search for "dangerous cult," on Google your first result is the official Church of Scientology website, much to the organization's chagrin of course.

Search bombs work because a lot of the ranking order of websites on search engines comes from determining a site's popularity among users. The search engines employ bots, or "spiders" to look for the amount of inbound links there are for a particular site, that is, links to the site from other online sources, such as other sites, online press releases, blogs, etc. In addition to tracking the number of inbound links, the bots track the words that the inbound links contain, i.e. the content in the (usually blue) linked text that you click on to get to the site. A common example of this is that when you search for "click here," your first result is the Adobe website, because there are so many sites that contain the phrase, "If you want to download Adobe reader, click here," with the site linked to the last two words of the sentence.

Hence, if a lot of people use the words "dangerous cult" on their websites and in other online content and then add a link from those two words to the Scientology website, the spiders will think that is the most popular site people are looking at for information on dangerous cults, thus giving it the number one ranking.

In the past, Google and other search engines have taken steps to stop these attacks, but obviously this was to a limited amount of success. You can be sure that this ranking will only be available for a limited time. Just as surely, other attacks will be forthcoming.

Search bombs are definitely not a new phenomenon. Two of the most memorable search bombs occurred five years ago during the months leading up to the 2004 elections in the United States. In the first case, when a user conducted a search for the term "miserable failure," he would be taken to the official site for George W. Bush. Republicans were also in on the act, linking the official John Kerry site to a search bomb for the word "waffles."