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SAN FRANCISCO: US President George Bush is no longer Google’s top response to Internet searches for “miserable failure.”
Queries for French military victories no longer take one to “defeats.” And Russian Internet users that type “enemy of the people” into Google are not directed to a biography of that nation’s leader, Vladimir Putin.
The California-based search colossus says it has finally defused such “Googlebombs”, that is, search term results rigged by clever outsiders to make comic or critical commentary.
“By improving our analysis of the Web, Google has begun minimising the impact of many Googlebombs,” Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini of Google wrote in a company Web log.
Googlebombs, also referred to as “link bombs”, provide links to unrelated sites under the guise of solving the query. For example, searches for “failure,” “fiasco,” and “miserable” in various languages resulted in links to various countries’ current or former leaders.
“Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us,” Moulton and Carattini explained in their blog.
“But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true.” To deactivate Googlebombs, Google engineers developed a search algorithm to neutralise them. “Computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in several languages,” Moulton and Carattini wrote. “That’s what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages.” Google ranks search results based on a mathematical model that factors in key words and popularity of Web sites. While Google has known about link bombs for years, it had previously expressed reluctance to defuse them individually because it didn’t want to tinker with the objectivity of its Internet search model. Google, however, cautioned that some link bombs will slip past the algorithm net, which will be tightened based on feedback from searchers. AFP