Tech Tonic

Thank God I remembered stuff from the Google Bombing piece I did for JAM magazine - I was sufficiently qualified, I guess to be an “expert” on the topic … actually expert is pushing it, but knowledgeable commentator is fair

I made my first news appearance as a “soundbyte” on Al-Jazeera, thanks to a former colleague who now works for a production house that does a weekly show for the English channel.

The Google bombing story starts at 5:15 in this nearly 12 minute video:

First published in JAM: Just Another Magazine

TORA TORA TORA
Since everyone seems to be in ‘Top 10 of the year’ mode, here are my Top 10 Google Bombs of all time …
1. Adam Mathes is the creator of the Google Bomb. He started the first Google bombing campaign as a practical joke on his friend Andy Pressman, who would be immortalised on the web with the words ‘talentless hack‘ linking to his site. Pressman’s site no longer exists though and the first match on Google these days is the original article that Mathes wrote on Uber!
2. Key in, ‘French military victories‘ and your first match will take you to a mock Google error page, claiming that “Your search did not match any documents” and asking you whether you meant ‘French Military Defeats’.
3. Searching for ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction‘ in Google will point you to a spoof version of the Microsoft IE error page.
4. Little wonder then that the words ‘miserable failure‘ when typed in Google throw up the official biography of President George W. Bush from the White House website.
5. Indian master blogger Jivha came up with what is probably the first Indian Google bomb. Google for ‘dishrag of india‘ and you would have been directed to the Times of India site. I say ‘would have’ because the bomb no longer works. In fact it points back to Jivha’s original post suggesting that his blog is obviously more popular than his bomb. He’s been kind enough though to leave a screenshot for us.
6. There’s a whole bunch of serious Google bombs out there. One of them wants to link the word Verisign to a webpage protesting against an apparent wrongdoing on the company’s part.
7. Matt Haughey bombed Critical IP, (a hosting company) for selling his WHOIS database information to tele-marketeers. The bomb no longer works though Google still ranks pages saying ‘Critical IP sucks’ amongst its top results!
8. An interesting ‘justice bomb’ is Operation Clambake which hopes to debunk the myths propogated by the Church of ‘Scientology‘.
9. The worst kind of Google bomb is the commercial kind. But since this one seems harmless, we’ll let Brigitte’s dad be the no.1 Santa Cruz Real Estate page on the web. (Hopefully he’ll start paying one day!)
10. And finally… an ego bomb! New York Times freelancer David Gallagher wants to be the most famous person by that name on the internet.