GOOGLE Bombing Cyberspace

NY Times:

It may be in Google’s interest to think of link bombs as nothing more than pranks, but Clifford Tatum, a doctoral student in communications at the University of Washington, compared them in a paper published in the online journal First Monday to the “media mindbombs” conceived by the late co-founder of Greenpeace, Bob Hunter.

“Reaching the public consciousness through dramatic, camera-ready opposition to environmental crimes” is how Greenpeace describes Mr. Hunter’s concept.

To the extent that the public consciousness is now just as likely to be reached through a computer screen as a television, the idea that passionate sorts would engage in computer-ready actions should come as no surprise.

And yet many people were shocked by the revelation two weeks ago that left-leaning bloggers were trying to drop a Google bomb on the campaigns of dozens of Republican candidates — not least because its bellicose promise seemed to throw into question the very integrity of search engine results.

This took link bombing to a new level. The key phrases targeted were the names of the Republican candidates themselves. The goal was to tweak things so that searching for “Clay Shaw,” the Republican representative from Florida, for example, would return — high in the results — a news article, preselected from a relatively mainstream publication, detailing some negative aspect of the candidate’s record. This was repeated for 50 or so candidates.

Did it work? The short answer is yes — somewhat. The folks at MyDD.com, where it all began, have been tracking the progress quite out in the open at mydd.com/tag/googlebomb. It’s worth a visit for people of all political persuasions, if only to catch a glimpse of the future of political strategizing.

That, and to forever eliminate any lingering notions that one needn’t think critically about what results come back from a search engine.

•“Anybody who looks for something on any search engine and thinks the results are the best or most impartial results, or that they came back completely organically is totally mistaken,” said Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, an online news site aimed at the search marketing industry.

The reasons for this are not entirely sinister, Mr. Sullivan explained. After all, as Google pointed out, search engines are programmed to gather, assess and ultimately rank sites based on their relevance to a given query — that is, they are already making decisions for us. And while competition dictates that as search engines get better at this, their results will be similar, they aren’t precisely the same. Each engine has a slightly different magic formula for indexing the incomprehensibly huge universe of Web pages out there.

The famous “miserable failure” query (a prank to some minds, an expression of popular discontent to others) now prompts just about every major search engine to return George W. Bush’s official White House biography as the No. 1 result — the handiwork of liberal link bombers during the 2004 election.

But conservative bloggers managed to retaliate by pushing Jimmy Carter’s official presidential biography to the No. 2 position — and more pointedly a mishmash of other results, depending upon which engine is being used, into the top 10. Microsoft’s MSN.com returns the home page of the liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore in the No. 3 slot. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate Web site is at No. 5.

But Yahoo’s search engine returns Mr. Moore’s site at No. 5, and Mrs. Clinton’s is nowhere to be seen on the first page. Ditto on Google.

And here’s an even better example: Search for the term “waffles” on Google and check out the top results. On Saturday, that search on Yahoo and MSN turned up the same, not entirely literal, result at No. 11 (second page of results) and No. 21 (third page) respectively. Since then, the ranking of this site has shifted mostly lower.

Bias? Not likely. Just difference. Google fans might say its formula is better. Fans of John Kerry might argue its formula isn’t discerning enough.

Reaching a hand in to alter or prevent funny business is risky for search companies, because that has outcomes, too. Remove Mr. Bush from the top slot and Mr. Carter bumps up. Remove Mr. Carter and Mr. Moore might slide up. The slope of perceived bias becomes impossible to avoid.

And over all, the engines, which return thousands or hundreds of thousands of links, offer up plenty of material for a discerning consumer to sift through.

But then, that’s the rub.

While it’s clear that ordinary users can band together and massage the outcome of a search, we remain, by and large, incredibly naïve users of search engines. Numerous studies have shown that precious few sleuths go beyond the first page of search results. “If it’s not on the first page, it might as well be invisible,” Mr. Sullivan said.

We also take much at face value. In results released last year, the Nielsen Norman Group, which surveys Internet behavior, found that fewer than 1 percent of searchers avail themselves of the advanced search options available on most search engines. And the Pew Internet and American Life Project found last year that while most consumers can distinguish between regular programming and infomercials on TV, and between regular content and advertorials in print publications, only 38 percent of searchers were aware of a distinction between paid and unpaid results among search returns.

•Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew project, said that Web users were slowly becoming more sophisticated.

“Information markets self-correct themselves the way economic markets do,” he said, “but there’s that arbitrage period that can extend long periods of time.”

Until then, though, the fast-growing industry known as search engine optimization — the buzz of business brand managers, public relations gurus and now political assassins — may well get the better of unsuspecting search engine users, in ways far more meaningful than “miserable failure” graffiti.

“I’ve been so long involved in this that it can seem obvious,” Mr. Sullivan said, referring to the ability to massage search results. “I think there’s just going to need to be some degree of growing up.”