This is not new or unique. According to Wikipedia, "Google bomb" was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2005.[1] The first instance I remember was "miserable failure" linking to Bush 43's biography.. so probably not Republicans.
"Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result.
In September 2000 the first Google bomb with a verifiable creator was created by Hugedisk Men's Magazine, a now-defunct online humor magazine, when it linked the text "dumb motherfucker" to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise."
> Didn't Google kill the 'miserable failure' google bomb of years ago?
From what I recall, that googlebomb is widely believed to have been "defused" algorithmically, by devaluing anchor text which didn't match the target page at all (e.g, "miserable failure" didn't appear on GWB's page). Those measures only really defused googlebombs to unsuspecting sites; they wouldn't help for sites which are intentionally trying to rank for a term that they are relevant for!
> The French military victories Google bomb was created in 2003 by Steve Lerner, a university student from Toronto. Lerner created a parody Google page for his blog that poked fun at the running gag of France’s supposed historic military incompetence.
Didn't Google kill the 'miserable failure' google bomb of years ago?
If I were Google's team I would kill this just because it looks very bad for Google. Let's assume Santorum goes on to win the Republican Primaries and then the Presidency. Is President Santorum going to be receptive or agressive if someone from Google (or the search industry in general) turns up on their doorstep?
It's the sort of thing that stays with people for a long time, rightly or wrongly.
This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known.
I’m sure Google did no research whatsoever to see whether <extremely common english word>.com was taken or not. Ha ha, he really got a good jab in there, didn’t he. So clever! :)
One thing that he did (dunno if he takes it for granted) is get a URL that matches with the top search phrase. If he'd named his company "GridFriend Creator", we'd be reading a VERY different article. Every time anyone links to him, it's like the George Bush "miserable failure" googlebomb [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb ]... Except that it's not frowned upon by Google.
Just some relevant context to that page, the person there left Google and is now running for office, so I would think twice about the claims they make.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
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