A Google bomb or Google wash is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by Google. Due to the way that Google's algorithm works, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent text. Googlebomb is used both as a verb and a noun.
For example, if a user registers many domainss and all of them link to a main site with the text "... is a living legend" then searching for "living legend" on Google will return the main site higher in the ranking, even if the phrase "living legend" doesn't appear on the main site. A common means of exploiting this is through weblogs, where although the entry may disappear from the main page quickly, the short-term effects of a link can dramatically affect the ranking of a given site. Empirical results indicate that it does not take a large number of websites to achieve a Googlebomb. The effect has been achieved with only a handful of dedicated weblogs.
The technique was first discussed on April 6, 2001 in an article by Adam Mathes. In that article, he coined the term "Google bombing" and explained how he discovered that Google used the technique to calculate page rankings. He found that a search for "internet rockstar" returned the website of Ben Brown as the first result, even though "internet rockstar" did not appear anywhere on Brown's webpage. He reasoned that Google's algorithm returned it as the first result because many fan sites that linked to Brown's website used that phrase on their own pages.
Mathes began testing his theory by setting out to make the website of his friend Andy Pressman the number one result for a query of "talentless hack". He gave instructions for creating websites and links to Pressman's website with the text of the link reading "talentless hack". Sure enough, as other webloggers joined in his Googlebombing campaign, Pressman's website became the number one result in a Google search for "talentless hack".
However, the first google bomb mentioned in the popular press may have occurred accidentally in 1999, when users discovered that the query "more evil than Satan" returned Microsoft's home page. Now, it returns links to several news articles on the discovery.
Ironically, Google bombs often end their life by being too popular or well known, thereby attaining a mention in well regarded web journals and knocking the bomb off the top spot. It is sometimes commented that Google bombing need not be countered because of this self-disassembly.
french military victories - hoax, Google look-a-like page saying "no results found for french military victories, did you mean french military defeats?"
Jew - JewWatch, an anti-Semitic group, was for a long time the number one hit when searching on Google for "Jew", perhaps because of its linking pattern. The Wikipedia entry replaced it following an organized Googlebombing campaign. Google searches for "Jew" return a highlighted entry at the head of the list, titled "Offensive Search Results," which explains the result.
Waffles - Returns John Kerry's 2004 election site.
Food Nazis - Points to "Center for Science in Public Interest" (which advocates strict regulatory oversight of genetically engineered foods).
Raar Kapsel (Weird Haircut in dutch) - Returns the biography of the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende, who is a Harry Potter lookalike
In May2004, Dark Blue [1] and SearchGuild.com[1] teamed up to create what they termed the "SEO Challenge". They offered an AppleiPod to the person whose page was the first result for the search phrase "nigritude ultramarine" one month after the competition's start, 9 A.M. June 72004. This winner was known as the "Player". A Sony flat-screen monitor was the prize for being the first result at 9 A.M. June 72004. This winner was known as the "Stayer".
The Player's Prize was won by Merkey, a forum which used a combination of googlebombing and keyword spamming. The Stayer's Prize was won by anildash, a weblog which won through blog-based googlebombing.
The contest sparked controversy around the Internet, as some groups worried that search engine optimization (SEO) companies would abuse the techniques used in the competition to alter queries more relevant to the average user. This fear was offset by the belief of others that Google would alter their algorithm based on the methods used by the googlebombers.
Google has defended its algorithms as simply a reflection of the opinion on the Web, saying that it is not damaging the overall quality of its services. Google has said it expects Googlebombing to return to obscurity and has dismissed it as "cybergraffiti" and just another internet fad.
Searching for miserabile fallimento (italian for "miserable failure") was returning Berlusconi biography, until the webmaster inserted the HTMLtag that prevents the page from being indexed by Google (<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow" />).
