Google ‘defuses’ googlebomb
If any of you have googled for ‘miserable failure’ in the past couple of days you’ll notice that the top result – the biography of George W. Bush – has been removed. A similar changed has been made to the search for ‘liar’, which used to return the biography of our own Supreme Leader.
But Google, in an apparently politically motivated move, has decided to blacklist certain results ‘tweak its algorithm’ to prevent googlebombs. I would believe that if it were actually true – several googlebombs which are not politically problematic for google, such as the ‘french military victories’ one (it returns a spoof 404 page suggesting people search for ‘french military defeats’ instead) are still alive and well.
I wouldn’t honestly care if Google had tweaked their algorithm to stop googlebombing. So what? The problem I have is that Google hasn’t tweaked the algorithm, they’ve just hardcoded the alteration of certain search results for political purposes. When they did this in China, they had the excuse of not having a choice other than not operating. When they do this elsewhere, its time for me to set a new default search engine in my Firefox.
EDIT: Yahoo UK, MSN UK and AllTheWeb all still return an unaltered list of search results. Bye bye Google.