Thursday, January 22, 2009

A New Googlebomb: Cheerful Achievement

The googlebomb “miserable failure" for a long time linked to US president Bush’s page on WhiteHouse.gov (a googlebomb happens when a group of people get together, coordinating themselves to link to a certain page using a certain agreed-upon phrase, often for humorous or political purposes). Now, there’s a new googlebomb: “cheerful achievement” [Update: Careful, some of the sites in the top 10 of that are now scammy.]. Search for it in Google.com (no quotes), and at this time, the top result returned is a page about US president Barack Obama (a page which does not contain the words “cheerful” or “achievement” at the moment).

Eric Baillargeon says, “In less than 24h I done it on Google.com with the help of a few Twitter friends”. Back in January 2007, Google claimed they had “begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs.”

[Thanks Eric!]

Update: Looks like Google’s bomb defusion algorithm works and caught this – by reporting on it, the reports on the googlebomb itself have now replaced the googlebomb in Google’s top results. [Thanks PierreS!] Update 2: ... though Google disclosed they had in fact to start their anti-bomb algorithm manually here, as its calculations are usually too computing-power intensive for the purpose.

A New Googlebomb: Cheerfu ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+36)

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