The thing about google bombs is that they are only an extreme form of what happens normally, with no intent to alter search engine results. I think many bloggers do not realise that we bloggers are taken very seriously by Google’s algorithms. Why else would the search for first names at google reveal that my blogging friends Joshua comes ninth in a search for ‘Joshua’ at google, Euan, perhaps due to his unusual first name comes top on the search for his name, but then so does Hugh Finally the search ‘Adrian’ brings me up at 19. Of course just talking about this and including these links here help to a small degree to promote this practice. But in all honesty, whilst in real life other people with these first names may be more important, on the internet Joshua, Euan, and Hugh these are the most important people with those first names in my book.
In many ways though this is as it should be, the google bomb is the ultimate example of democracy at work. If real people can be bothered enough to link to a site, then I am in general more interested in what they think of it than a computer algorythm. Google’s achilies heal, is in many ways its greatest strength. It seems to beat hands down most other attempts at searching the worlds largest rubbish heap and pulling out sites that are of interest to me.
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