Spotlights on Googlebombs

Googlebomb is somehow an illegal attempt to change the results displayed by search engines and especially Google, by adding a huge number of backlinks on multiple websites from the internet.
The procedure is very simple because anyone can do a Googlebomb but, if the company manages to identify the attacker, the consequences can be very harsh. Most Googlebombs concern political figures or celebrities, displaying humorous images or weblinks on the first positions in Google's search engine result page. In the past, users created a Bush Googlebomb by naming a picture with the US president's name and then by placing multiple backlinks on the sites from the internet.

The Googlebombs matter was discussed every time a new bomb appeared on the Google search engine but this time, the company's employees decided to talk about the illegal procedure to explain and present Google's thoughts about this operation.

"People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. 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, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs," Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini said on the official blog of the company.

Technically, Google can block a Googlebomb attempt with ease by banning or removing all the websites that contain backlinks to a specific malicious website or even by blocking the main websites, but it seems the procedure is more difficult. Google employees answered: "When we're faced with a bad search result or a relevance problem, our first instinct is to look for an automatic way to solve the problem instead of trying to fix a particular search by hand.

Algorithms are great because they scale well: computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in many different languages. That's what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages. We wouldn't claim that this change handles every prank that someone has attempted. But if you are aware of other potential Googlebombs, we are happy to hear feedback in our Google Web Search Help Group."