posted
It seems that the number one site when you do a Google search for Jew is an anti-semitic website called Jew Watch. The Jerusalem Post has an article about the whole matter. Google, of course, won't manually change the rankings, so there's been an attempt at Google bombing to raise the ranking of Wikipedia's entry on Jews. It's up to number three now, right behind jewfaq.org, which has also probably been linked to with greater frequency lately.
Edit to add: One of the ways Google works is that it keeps track of the text used to link to a site. If a lot of people link to a site using a particular word, then a search for that word will turn up that site on Google, even if that site does not contain the word itself. For example, if you do a Google search for "miserable failure," the first site you will see is Bush's bio. Google bombing usually takes a cooperative effort--you have to spread the meme around. Most of the bombing is done by bloggers. More on Google bombing
posted
part of google's rank system uses the number of times a site has been linked to. That's how the "weapons of mass destruction" 404 error page was done.
so they're looking for people to link to the jew wikipedia site to increase its ranking.
Posts: 1892 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
Nicely done, Shigosei and co-bombers. Right now, searching for Jew shows the Wikipedia article at number two, and jewfaq.com (one of my favorite sites! ) at number three.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Of course, it would also be nice if this great site about Jews were above Jew Watch. Jewfaq has made several appearances in Rivka's thread, so it's obviously a very good source. Don't Jew think so? (Apologies for the bad pun, but I couldn't help sneaking another link in there).
posted
Unfortunately Google doesn't index sites with a '?' in them. The easiest way for this crowd to GoogleBomb is to have the college students use their webspace -- so long as it's on the same domain, they get a giant PageRank boost for free.
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Hmm. Maybe the sites where this excuse has been used just have a really restrictive .robots file.
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Quite possibly. Also, I predict they're given a bit less precedence as regards the sites they link to.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Hmm, I've read that the Google staff frown upon deliberate manipulation of site ranking and may penalize a site that engage in such practices. Hopefully it might not be an issue in this case though.
Posts: 896 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
They don't penalize directly (but only through manipulating the generalized algorithm), except for certain particularly blatant (and commercial) abuses. And the answer is often a simple de-listing.
Stuff like this is fine.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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