I think I'm the first person who has had a Google bomb defused by Google.
First, some background. Google says they don't alter their algorithms. And they also say that Google bombs are harmless.
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"Craig Silverstein, Google's director for technology, says the company sees nothing wrong with the public using its search engine this way. No user is hurt, he said, because there is no clearly legitimate site for 'miserable failure' being pushed aside. Moreover, he said, Google's results were taking stock of the range of opinions that are expressed online. 'We just reflect the opinion on the Web,' he said, 'for better or worse.' " -- International Herald Tribune, December 9, 2003
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"Google Inc., the leading Internet search engine, said Monday that it had no plans to alter its search results despite complaints that the first listing on a search for the word "Jew" directs people to an anti-Semitic Web site.
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"The company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., said it had no plans to remove the site from the search results list because it trusts its automated program to rank Web sites accurately. The search engine has been listing "Jewwatch.com" as the first-ranked site for three years.
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" 'We find this result offensive, but the objectivity of our ranking function prevents us from making any changes,' said David Krane, a spokesman for Google, adding that an exception is made only in cases where a site is illegal." -- New York Times, April 13, 2004
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I believe that the situation is quite different from what Google claims. It looks to me like Google hacked their algorithm so that when the word "executives" appears with the word "touch" in front of it in the search box, then Google's page at
www.google.com/corporate/execs.html is desensitized and will not appear in the results.
Contrast this with using "touch google executives," where the word executives is not preceded by the word "touch." The results haven't changed. And instead of using "executives," use the word "management." This is a collateral effect of my original "out-of-touch executives" bomb, as the
New York Times pointed out on June 25. Note that the rankings are still very high for all variations of "touch" with "management." Google defused "executives" but they forgot to defuse "management."
As far as I can tell, it's only when the word "executives" appears with the word "touch" in front that Google's page drops out. I think it's a hand tweak. Last week I considered the possibility that it dropped out due to some spam filter. But I doubt this now, because there has not been the sort of upheavel in the results during the last few weeks that would be evident by now, if something as dramatic as what happened to "executives" was happening across the entire index for certain keywords.
Other bombs are working fine -- "miserable failure" is still working, and so is "french military victories." Why is it that the word "executives," when preceded by the word "touch," is so toxic in terms of its ability to produce Google's page? This happened suddenly about three weeks ago, after spending a solid four months at the number one spot.
Here's a
real-time look at the current rankings (within the top 100) for various search terms in Google and Yahoo. The Yahoo rankings still look the way Google used to look -- number one almost all the way for everything. Doesn't it seem suspicious?
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Google defuses a Google bomb
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