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Wikipedia Pushes Google Into Deep S**t!

Weird result returned by Google

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

17th of May 2007, 19:31 GMT

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Yesterday, Google was affected by a strange Wikipedia modification that changed the content of an article indexed by Google. Although it wasn't a Googlebomb, the article was concerning a US president, George Washington. It seems like it all started when a user modified an article posted on Wikipedia just before it was crawled by Googlebot. Then, the page was indexed on Google search and provided a somehow embarrassing result for the Mountain View company:

"Had a s**t on a stick and then told people that it was ok to have unprotected sex."

Search Engine Land discovered the problem and sustained that the result affects Google but the fault belongs to Wikipedia. "It's embarrassing for Google, but the fault really lies with Wikipedia, since this text stayed on Washington's page long enough for Google to catch it. Indeed, it looks to have been on the page for at least a day. It's gone now, but when I looked about a half hour ago, the text was still there. It will probably take about another day for the description to fall out of Google itself, once the page is recrawled," Danny Sullivan sustained for Search Engine Land.

Although I admit that this is quite embarrassing, it seems that Wikipedia was quite fast and managed to remove the incorrect text quickly. According to the log posted on the official site of Wikipedia, the article was modified after only one minute since the incorrect information was posted. However, it took a while until the Googlebot crawled the webpage again and displayed the modified article on the SERP.

This is quite an interesting issue because even if it's not a Googlebomb, the users managed to influence the content published on Google to display incorrect information. At this time, the message was removed because the Googlebot crawled the correct version of the website.

TAGS:

google | wikipedia

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