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Self-detonating a Google bomb

  • Apr. 10th, 2007 at 4:28 PM
sunglasses
According to this article on Webpronews:


"Google may have fixed a link bomb in January that had President George W. Bush listed as the top results for "failure" or "miserable failure", but now due to a White House oversight the President is once again ranked number one for the search term "failure" on Google."

Apparently, the page was removed, but the appearance of the word "failure" on a White House webpage was enough to detonate the bomb again. The reason the word appeared? Complaining about Congress' "failure" to give him a bill he could sign for funding for the war in Iraq.

I think that would be some of that poetic justice, being dished out by the Internet, no?

Comments

[info]wordweaverlynn wrote:
Apr. 10th, 2007 11:49 pm (UTC)
You can't mock God. Or the Internet. We always get our vengeance.
[info]abostick59 wrote:
Apr. 11th, 2007 02:17 am (UTC)
There was no page to remove. What happened was that Google tweaked their s33kr1t 4lg0r1thm to defuse such bombs; but that apparently putting bomb text on the target page retriggers the bomb despite the tweak.

I think it's a corollary to Gödel's theorem that you can't make a set of rules ungameable without making it unusable as well. You have to compromise between gameability and utility.