Fri, 23 Jan 2004

Search Engine Bombing

Jan over at Secular Blasphemy has a link today to this New York Times article on the growing sport of "Google Bombing".

The Times article quotes Google's director of technology as saying they're not too worried, but then goes on

...some in the industry say Google may be more worried than it lets on. The company's success, to a large extent, has been built on its search algorithm's ability to return relevant Web pages and weed out irrelevant or outright bogus results. The growing popularity of Google bombing can't be a welcome development for a company that is expected to begin selling stock to the public in a few months.

I'd be worried if I were at Google. This exposes a somewhat serious flaw in the famous page-rank system that makes Google so cool.

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