Google Bombing for the Good of Society
William Grosso @ June 7, 2008
I just discovered this morning that Peter Seibel, whom I deeply respect and have lunch with every other year, has been successfully manipulating the very fabric of the web.
A bit of explanation: “Link text” is the label that is displayed with a hyperlink. So, in the paragraph above, “successfully manipulating the very fabric of the web” is the link text. Search engines take “link text” very seriously– when you link to a page, you’re providing a very concise description of that page in a way that’s easily understood by computers.
Peter noticed that the results of a google search on “lisp tutorial” led to a page he didn’t like1 and asked the lisp community to create links with the text “lisp tutorial” that link to his book (like this link: lisp tutorial).
Sure enough, just by doing that, his book is now the top result on google for lisp tutorial.
Google bombing is nothing new, of course. But it’s usually done by fairly large groups of people for entertainment purposes (the famous example is the first result for french military victory, which is a fake Google page asking “Did you mean: french military defeats”).
It’s interesting, though, that the Peter managed to correct a google search result, and improve Google’s search results, by asking for a very link from a very small community (not a lot of people read Peter’s blog, or linked to his book). It means that, more than I realized, Google simply reflects social consensus and can be easily manipulated once you get outside of mainsteam topics2.
- For good reason. It was from 1999 and very out of date.↩
- The manipulation is fairly focused though– in spite of the fact that he owns “lisp tutorial”, Peter’s book is nowwhere to be found on the search results for “learning lisp”↩
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