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Martin Luther King Googlebomb Campaign  (View post)

Nicolas [PersonRank 0]

Tuesday, January 16, 2007
17 years ago13,721 views

Nice to see it worked. Interestingly, the hateful site still ranks first on live.com, but doesn't appear at all on the first page on Yahoo.

Milly [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

>> "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.”"

Well, a less wrong approach, I'd say. But gaming the system still sucks, and successful gaming shows that the system is borked (both to a lesser or greater extent).

Was the MartinLutherKing.org site ranked by organic merit, or by a (form of) googlebomb of it's own, I wonder?

>> "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."

Hmm, I only see two: nobelprize.org and wikipedia.org ?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I'm getting seattletimes.nwsource.com/mlk/ at #3 here, guess it's one of those datacenter shuffles...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Ugh, there's this annoying "personalized search results" link. I just disabled that, and the hate site moved up one position.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

<< I just disabled that, and the hate site moved up one position. >>

At least it moved *up* when you disabled personalized search... ;-)

Natasha Robinson [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

The most disturbing part about this who thing is the sites who link to this crap. I was doing a backlink search (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Fmartinlutherking.org&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s) and noticed that many reputable sites link to this site such as the Rock The Vote site (http://www.rockthevote.com/home.php) under the heading "Rock the Vote Honors Dr. King". Are you kidding me? Do these sites even bother to check the content they are linking to. This must be a bad joke – either that or sheer incompetence on the part of their webmasters or editorial team.

Bucky [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

it shows up as the 3rd result for me. BTW, you need to turn off strict filtering to see it, or else it won't show up at all.

George R [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Try searching [ martin luther king -hate] if you do not want that site.
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=martin+luther+king+-hate

I also tried a search for back links to martinlutherking DOT org which indicated 189 back links.

[The direct link is intentionally omitted here, in case it's reference might boost their PageRank.
I tried providing indirect links through tinyXXurl.com (without the XX), but the word without the XX causes the submission to be blocked.]

When I exclude "blog" only 9 back links remain.

The first is from a page on the site itself.
The other eight are either pointing out the problems with this site or using it as an example that references need to be validated.

Remove XX for link:...
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:martinluXXtherking.org&num=100
http://tinyXXurl.com/yvx3tg

Remove XX for link:... -blog
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:martinluXXtherking.org+-blog&filter=0
http://tinyXXurl.com/3yv76w

Phil Bradley [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Sorry, but I have to disagree on this one. I've always kept a very close watch on this site, because it's a useful one to point to when I'm teaching. About 3 years ago it was 6th in Google for the search 'martin luther king', but it generally hangs in there at about 4th. I checked it on Martin Luther King Day and it was in 2nd position. Checked today and it's back in 4th. (Data centres, filtering and personalization permitting). I don't actually think the campaign had any real success at all to be honest, which is a shame, since it's a nasty little site.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

> I've always kept a very close watch on this site, because
> it's a useful one to point to when I'm teaching

Which site? And useful in which way?

Natasha Robinson [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Good to see that MTV's Rock the Vote site took my complaint to heart and removed the link. They also wrote an apology on their blog about the link: http://blog.rockthevote.com/2007/01/last-night-rock-vote-made-mistake.html

The part that disturbs me about the apology is that the webmaster simply used ranking in Google as a means to find an authoritative site.

Seth Finkelstein [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Phil [Bradley], it was definitely #1 for a time – many bloggers noted that.

Good work, Natasha

Phil Bradley [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Philipp – I've always kept a close eye on the racist MLK site. It's useful when I'm teaching because it's a good example of how you can't believe everything that you see on the net, that Google isn't that interested in the search results that it serves up, that it's possible to manipulate the rankings and so on. I also use various other examples, but this is probably the 'best'.

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