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Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Martin Luther King Googlebomb Campaign

A while ago, according to InternetNews.com, MartinLutherKing.org appeared as top result on Google when searching for martin luther king. On a very brief glance at the site’s design and navigation entries like “The King Holiday - Bring the Dream to Life”, you seem to be on a neutral history site – but spend more than 10 seconds on it and you realize it’s a stupid hate site, with claims such as ...

Jews are the foremost promoters of “hate crime” laws intended to be used mainly against whites, while at the same time looking with smiling approval upon black criminals who openly call for murder and mayhem against white people.

... and campaigns titled “Why the King Holiday Should be Repealed!” The site also happens to be hosted with the guys of Stormfront.org (Stormfront.org, incidentally, is censored in Google Germany).

Well, that was in November 2006. Until someone – Tim Hoffman, blogger and project manager – had enough of it and started “a good old fashioned Google bomb”, linking to, and urging others to link to, more neutral sites using the link text “Martin Luther King”. Gotta say this is the right approach to counter search results gone awry – much more meaningful than shouting for censorship or complaining about “evil Google.” And it seems to be working, too, as a current Google.com-search for martin luther king shows 3 non-hateful results above Stormfront’s site.

[Via Seth Finkelstein. Photo in the public domain courtesy of Tcnj.edu.]

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