Google Bombs: New Cyber War (and Propaganda) Tool

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 23:11:28 -0500
From: "Stephen D. Poe" <sdpoe () acm org>
Subject: Google Bombs: New Cyber War (and Propaganda) Tool
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

Dave -

For IP if you like. Given how many people worldwide now rely on search 
engines, the spin potential is even more enormous than a few monopolistic 
media giants. :-)

Stephen


Current Example:
---------------------
Kerry gets served up with 'waffles'

Mon Apr 12, 6:15 AM ET

By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY

Some jokers who don't like the Democratic presidential candidate are trying 
to make his campaign Web site, johnkerry.com, the first answer to a search 
of the word "waffles" on Google, the No. 1 Internet search engine.

They've nearly succeeded on the No. 2 search engine, Yahoo. By Sunday, 
eight days after the prank began, johnkerry.com was listed second among 
703,000 results of a Yahoo search of the word "waffles."

At the No. 3 search engine, MSN Search, johnkerry.com was also the second 
Web page result of a search Sunday for "waffles."

On Google, johnkerry.com was not in the top 1,000 of the 556,000 results of 
a search for "waffles."

Authorities on search engines say the joke's quick impact on Yahoo and MSN, 
though, is a sign that the campaign is working and that Google will be 
affected soon.

The high-tech twist on old-fashioned political chicanery follows an 
Internet prank last year that still tweaks President Bush (news - web 
sites). Anti-Bush practical jokers made Bush's official biography at 
whitehouse.gov. the first result of a Google search of the phrase 
"miserable failure."

Equally clever Bush supporters came to his defense. They've made his 
biography the No. 1 result of a Google search for "great president."

Web-savvy jokers call a scheme to push Internet users to a specific Web 
site "Google bombing." It takes a coordinated effort by many Web sites and 
blogs. "Blog" is short for Web log, a kind of online diary.

The brains behind the waffles stunt is Ken Jacobson, a Duquesne University 
Law School student. He started the waffles campaign on April 3, when he 
first posted a blog he calls Esoteric*Diatribe (www 
.esoteric-diatribe.blogspot.com), which he writes on a personal computer 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.

By Sunday, 44 other Web sites and blogs were helping Jacobson.

The trick is fairly simple to accomplish. Basically, Jacobson's plan to 
manipulate Google will succeed if a large number of Web sites and blogs - 
no one can say how many are needed - "link" the word "waffles" to 
johnkerry.com. Anyone who clicks on that word when viewing any of those 
sites will be sent to Kerry's site.

One of the things that Google's software looks for when it ranks search 
results is how many links there are from the queried word or phrase to 
particular Web sites. The more links from "waffles" to Kerry's site, the 
greater the chance that johnkerry.com will be a top search result.

Jacobson hopes johnkerry.com is in the top 100 of Google search results for 
"waffles" by midsummer and No. 1 by Election Day. It took slightly more 
than five weeks for the "miserable failure" campaign to push Bush's 
biography to No. 1.

Google processes about 200 million search requests a day. It handles nearly 
41% of all searches. Yahoo handles about 27%. MSN Search accounts for 
nearly 20%.

Chris Sherman, associate editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, a Web site that 
tracks the search engine industry, says, "Google is a miserable failure for 
allowing these things to occur." He says "a small subset of people with 
clear agendas" are skewing search results.

But Craig Silverstein, Google's technology director, says, "Our philosophy 
is that there's no need (for Google) to do anything." Even search results 
fueled by "Google bomb" campaigns "are appropriate," Silverstein says. 
"There's an association that people make from the word or phrase to the 
results."

Also, Silverstein says, few people are affected by search results skewed by 
Google bombs. "Miserable failure" isn't a term that is searched very often. 
"Waffle recipe" is a more likely search request than "waffles."

Sherman says the most likely reason Yahoo was affected so quickly is that 
it must have recently updated the "index" of Web pages it searches to 
include Jacobson's blog or the other sites involved in the waffles campaign.

Search engines such as Yahoo and Google constantly update their indexes, 
but obscure sites such as Jacobson's blog sometimes aren't detected right 
away by the search engines' computers. The search engines "crawl" the 
Internet all the time but don't scan new or rarely visited sites every day.

Yahoo does not disclose how many such pages are in its index. Google says 
it has 4.3 billion. Sherman says that since Yahoo has already been affected 
by the waffles prank, Google almost surely will be soon.

Sherman says media coverage such as this newspaper story will help Jacobson 
and other pranksters achieve their objectives by drawing attention to their 
efforts.

Background:
----------------


   Cyber-Warfare

This is the information age and a major war over public opinion is being 
waged. It seems apparent that a major casualty of this war came in 1999 
<http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/01/278909.shtml> when the first ever 
Google-bomb <http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/googlebombs.htm> 
resulted in the first major casualty of this war... the truth.

You may remember reading a few months back how some democrats, working with 
liberal bloggers, were able to make the Google search, 'miserable failure' 
lead to the White House biography of George W. Bush. As a Bush supporter, I 
can agree with the left: that was pretty funny?. But what are the long term 
implications of Google Bombing?

Google downplays this problem, saying

   We're only seeing it with obscure queries where there's really not
   that much action on the Web about them,' said Craig Silverstein,
   Google's director of technology. 'I don't think it's possible to do
   this sort of thing on queries with well-defined results like '
   I.B.M.' So given that it only affects one query out of the more than
   200 million a day we handle, it's hard to see it becoming much of a
   problem.
I cannot agree. This seems to be a major problem. In terms of current 
events and searching for news stories, you can only find websites that 
agree with and or google-link sites to the query you are searching for. 
This allows for organized disinformation campaigns; it is going on even as 
we speak. Type in 'jew 
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=jew>' into a google 
search engine. Instead of the top site discussing this great religeon and 
culture, or even sites discussing the terrible tragedy that was the 
Holocaust, the first result, Jew Watch, is a disguesting, hatefilled, site 
whose first place ranking undoubtedly was the result of Google Bombing by 
extremists who amount to nothing more than cyber terrorists in the war over 
public opinion. Google should be ashamed of a system that allows such 
rubbsih to become the number one link.

It seems like the end result of all of this is that the truth is doomed to 
become hopelessly obscured by special interests trying to spin the results 
of the most popular search engine in the world to favor their point of 
view. Perhaps the scariest reality in all of this is that America's youth 
are growing up on the web and becoming entirely dependent on search engines 
as a source of news and sources for their research papers. The young and 
impressionable likely do not have the skills required to wade through all 
of the lies to find the truth. Then again, they aren't much better off 
reading the garbage printed in the NYT. Its a sad, sad world.

Let it be noted, though, that I am trying to start my very own Google-Bomb 
campaign amongst conservative bloggers in retaliation for the whole 
miserable failure thing. You can participate by putting this link waffles 
<http://www.johnkerry.com/> up on your own blogsite.
- 
http://esoteric-diatribe.blogspot.com/2004_04_04_esoteric-diatribe_archive.html#108106196111273292

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