The bomb is back, Obama the victim

Mon 16 November 2009 16:00, Bas van den Beld

It was the biggest internet-joke of them all for a while, the Google bomb which put George Bush on the top position for the search "miserable failure". Google put a stop to the bombing but now faces another president being victim of a Google bomb.

Searchengineland saw Obama's whitehouse.gov page turn up at the number one spot when looking for "who is the failure". Now the result has dropped to number three with two Seroundtable results being on top, but the Google bomb is without a doubt back.

Google bombs are being 'made' by having many sites link to a specific page with the same line of text, in this case "who is the failure". If done correctly that will result a page being on top of the results.

Back in 2007 Google made sure Google bombs weren't so easily exploitable anymore. Matt Cutts then said they made algorithmic changes to prevent these things from happening. This was completely automated. He then already added “we’re not going to claim it’s 100 percent perfect.” That now becomes clear.

Early this year Matt Cutts explained some more about the phenomenon after Obama turned out to rank for "failure" as a left over of the Bush administration. He then stated the algorithm used to prevent Google bombs is only run a couple of times a year:

"in most typical cases we tend not to run that algorithm every single time we crawl new web data. I think that during 2008 we re-ran the Googlebomb detection algorithm 5-6 times, for example." Cutts said

He also made a nice drawing of how the Google bomb algorithm works:

Now we have to wait and see how long it takes Google to run the algorithm on this specific issue.

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