The googlebomber

Nice summary of the issue.

I've conjectured that relating word can re-ignite the Google-bomb. This can be tested, if people link like the following:
George Bush: "Miserable Failure"

Hmm. I'm guessing the column came before the post - P looks more like an edit of C than C does an expansion of P. Besides, doing it the other way round would rouse the envy as well as the admiration of every other blogger who's ever got into print, and you wouldn't want that.

Now, this is interesting: the similar googlebomb for Ehud Olmert described here still works: viola. Note that the domain is google.com rather than google.co.il (which I suspect passes requests back to the mothership in any case).

Agree with Seth - it's impossible stop Googlebombing completely, without a major change to the way Google calculates relevance. Just need to be more creative.

White house failure works for me.

The important thing here isn't whether googlebombing works or not.



It's what Nick points out - that it could be argued that Google once represented results as presented by the 'wisdom of the crowd' - by democratic means - and as this illustrates - that's no longer true. And maybe never was in the first place.



Google has safeguards *against* the crowd.

I think I'm kinda depressed.

P came before C, actually. Nick

OK, now I'm green.

So tell us, Mr. Carr, do you prefer Kant or Mill for your ethical philosophy.



I know following the line of "what is their motivation?" makes for a juicier story that gets more headlines that pay your bills, but I've always tried to separate the actor's intentions from the results of their act. A poorly-intentioned act can have good consequences and a well-intentioned act can go disastrously wrong. To really provide an effective analysis of the situation, I submit that you should separate the two a bit better?

Philomath, Could you be less clever and a little clearer in your statement/question? What point are you trying to make?

News of the death of the Google bomb is greatly exaggerated. Go search on "miserable failure" today and you'll get a gazillion items that explain that "miserable failure" was linked to George W. Bush through Googlebombing. Reminds me of the scene if Fantasia where Mickey chops up the enchanged broom into a gazillion splinters and then all of the splinters re-animate into a gazillion enchanted brooms. Was Google's mission accomplished? No more than the miserable failure's.

Maybe the monoculture is part of the problem.
See may small cartoon.

Bye,
Oliver

Timothy,


In a nutshell, Kant's ethical philosophy focused on the intent behind an act. If you did something that had a good outcome, but your intention wasn't also good, than the good act was a wash, morally speaking. With Mill (and the other Utilitarians), the focus was on the outcome and the intention behind the act was ignored. I know that there is more to both philosophies than that, but I think that's a decent summation.


In his article, Mr. Carr discussed how Google fixed a glitch in their system to provide what one might consider more accurate results. My point is that, from a Utilitiarian perspective, why even discuss their intentions? If you agree that they improved their search system and if you agree that, regardless of motive, this improvement is a good thing, why be irate about their reasoning. Now, if you prefer Kant's view, then their motive was all that mattered. But, regardless of their motive, we all get an even sweller search engine. So I am pointing out that it might be better to just aplaud their fix and be done with it, rather than eye everyone suspiciously.

Philomath, Thanks for the Philosophy 101 lecture, but you seem to have missed the forest for the trees. The post is not about the intent or outcome in this one case, but rather about the creeping tendency of Google to manipulate searches to get outcomes that it deems positive. Yes, sometimes it may be a positive, sometimes a negative, but the troubling fact is that you'll never even know that the search has been rigged.

I appreciate bringing Kant and the Utilitarians into the discussion but I have to agree with Timothy in that the point was really how Google has lost its initial innocence (if ever it did have such a thing) when it comes to manipulating its search results -no matter what the intention of that act may be. A significant sentence is: "So the company is allowing its concerns about its public image to influence its search results." Hey, here we are, interpreting Nick's words like some scrap of ancient scripture, although normally his writing is far from opaque. Aren't geeks great? ;-)

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