Political Bloggers Planning Google Bombs

Posted on October 25, 2006

Some political bloggers are planning strategic Google bombs that they hope will be seen by people searching for information about a candidate as the November elections draws closer. Wikipedia defines a Google bomb as "Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking (called PageRank) of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions." In this case the intentions are clearly political. The National Journal reports that liberal bloggers came up with the idea first.

The National Journal says John Hawkins of Right Wing News is urging his conservative allies to "fight fire with fire." He says, "Who would be doing a Google search on a particular candidate in the final days of a campaign? Probably an independent voter who is trying to get more information about a candidate. And if the first article he runs across is a brutal hit piece, well, that could be the information that helps him make up his mind."

You can see the call-to-action from Chris Bowers on DailyKos. Hawkins' post on Right Wing News also reminds everyone of the Google bomb that turns up George Bush's bio when "miserable failure" is searched on Google. That particular google bomb still works today. Wikipedia has a list of several other political Google bombs.