Want a giggle? Google “weapons of mass destruction.” But be sure to click the button that says, “I’m feeling lucky.” You are, aren’t you? The resulting page, which satirizes the Bush administration as bomb-happy, is what is known, perhaps ironically, as a “Google bomb”: a gag that exploits a feature of the popular search engine’s algorithm and forces a particular result. According to John Hiler of Microcontent News, the Google bomb was born in 2001 when Adam Mathes of the webzine über discovered that Google will display pages linked to pages containing your search term. For example, search for “pineapple enema,” and Google will display pages containing that term (for example, discussing the Adam Sandler magnum opus Little Nicky) as well as pages that link to those pages. Get a large enough group of people with Web sites together – bloggers, for instance – and have them link to a specific page via the text “pineapple enema,” and voila! a Google bomb detonates. “In other words,” says Hiler, “the linker can impact the Google [r]ank of the linkee.” There’s nothing new about Google bombs: In 2001, Wired reported on one of the most famous, which caused the search term “dumb motherfucker” to pull up a site hawking Bush for President merchandise, and GeekPress has been talking about the algorithm’s loophole since 2000. What’s surprising is that Google hasn’t quite managed to defuse them.
This article appears in April 23 • 2004.