Why, whatever will the goof-offs, fuckups, tricksters and scam artists to do game their Google
rankings? Check it out:
US President George W. 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."
Links to web pages about Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da
Silva no longer pop up in searches in Portuguese for "drunken despot."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 Mountain View, California-based search colossus says it has
finally defused such "Googlebombs," search term results rigged by
clever outsiders to make comic or critical commentary.
At least we might finally see an end to the spamblogs that exist only to "link-farm". (Lesson/- the way it useta work, the more incoming and outgoing links you had on a page, the higher your ranking when Google returned a search query. This was useful to players in the gambling and porn spaces – since if you’re searching for "Lituanian lobster porn" you want your page to beat out the rivals at Fleshbot or Skank, so the drooling one-handed surfer buys a membership to your "service." /Lesson.)
The larger implications here are that it is growing increasingly important to control, manipulate or otherwise game how it is that you are viewed online. And the main front to that is, at least right now, what someone sees when they do a Google search for an individual/business/movement/product. This move by Google will crisp millions of man-hours of work to game the search algorithims done in the sweatshops of Hunan and Bangalore and Novosibirsk.
It will be interesting to see what the "Counter-move" to this will be… I figure it will be about two months before we start hearing about the new&improved way to slip through the cracks of Google.