Indexing structure update

By improving its algorithm Google bombing is mostly thing of the past. Most of the examples below have only worked at the time of publishing.

Is Putin enemy of the people?

Russian President Vladimir Putin did not escape criticism of his own nation. Some clever people from Russian Republic had engineered the Google bomb prank which describs Putin as the enemy of the people. The knowledge of Russian language is helpful but not required.

Arabian Gulf Google Bomb

It started with the Lego Fish, a blogger who after the outrage of the Iranian community as well as the Iranian government over the National Geographic's mistake of printing "Arabian Gulf" in brackets, underneath the true name for this important waterway, suggested that the online community of Iranians retaliate by Google bombing the keywords: "Arabian Gulf". In this combined efforts of many hundreds of bloggers, and Persian forums, they pointed links with the phrase "Arabian Gulf" to the error page found at www.arabian-gulf.info.

Operation Clambake

One of the most successful, long-lasting and widespread link bomb has been the linking of the term "Scientology" to Operation Clambake. In this case, the index rating clearly emerges from both the individual decisions of pagewriters and reporters and an organized effort lead by the Operation Clambake itself. In this case, the "bombers" believe they may be saving people's lives by giving them important information. The Church of Scientology has also sometimes been accused of an attempt at Google bombing for making a large number of websites linking terms "Scientology" and "L. Ron Hubbard" to each other.

Tony Blair Accused

The keyword liar on google.co.uk returns Tony Blair, the UK Prime Minister, accused of misleading the public over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (as of 2005-12-30 Blair is back in first place, with the IMDb page for "Liar Liar" falling back into second place) He is also first in the world rankings at google.com on top.

Gastrointestinal Dysentery

Gastrointestinal Dysentery returns Kres Chophouse and Lounge in Orlando, Florida. Some time ago this restaurant has fired a server for blogging about work.

Google Official Reply

Official reply from Google concerning the word failure and other bombs:

"If you do a Google search on the word failure or the phrase miserable failure, the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns."

"Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission."

Google Updates Algorithm

In February 2005 Google has updated the algorithm that largely affects, among other things, Google bombs. This is largely due to Google refactoring its valuation of PageRank, mostly in an effort to keep up with the encroaching result relevancy of the Yahoo and MSN search engines, which many people claim are not nearly as easy to "hack" as Google.

Nofollow Attribute

Blogspot has been upgraded on 18 January 2005 when the Google blog entry "Preventing comment spam" declared that Google will henceforth respect a rel="nofollow" attribute on hyperlinks. Their page ranking algorithm now avoids links with this attribute when ranking the destination page. The intended result is that site administrators can easily modify user-posted links such that the attribute is present, and thus an attempt to googlebomb by posting a link on such a site would yield no increase in that link's rank.

Number One For Waffles

Ken Jacobson is behind the waffles Google bomb. He is a student at Duquesne University Law School. He started the waffles campaign on April 3, when he first posted a blog he calls Esoteric Diatribe esoteric-diatribe.blogspot.com, which he writes in his Pittsburgh apartment.
"It's political fun and a bit sophomoric," says Jacobson, 23, a native of Canfield, Ohio. "But I believe George W. Bush is a man of conviction and a man of his word. I can't say the same for Sen. Kerry."
"Waffles," Jacobson says, "isn't as mean as 'miserable failure' but says something about what many people feel about Kerry," who Republicans say is a political chameleon. Jacobson says he has had no contact with the Bush campaign. The Kerry campaign had no comment about his effort. "