Google has artificially played around with the search for miserable failure which used to link directly to the US President's biography. Now it leads to a BBC article about the Google bomb. They've also done the same with 'liar' which no longer points towards information on the British Prime Minister either. The New York Times has an interesting article on this. Google claim that by better understanding their analysis of the link structure of the Web searches would instead result in links to commentary, discussions and articles about the tactic.
Well, I can understand why Google has done this, but I'm not sure that it's a clever idea. It now opens them up to criticism whenever any Google bomb continues to work - they haven't changed the 'french military victories' result for example, which pokes fun at the French. One could therefore argue that Google isn't happy with fun being poked at the US President, but they're fine and ok with it happening to the entire French nation. Then there's the Martin Luther King racist site as well, which is in the position it's in (currently 6th) because of links, rather than being there on its own merit. Is Google ok with that? One could assume that they are, since they've done nothing about it.
One could of course argue that any set of results is going to be artificial, since they're based on some algorithm or the other, and that's true. However, you either go with the formula that you've got and live with the results, or change the formula surely? By going around and tweaking results by hand is surely demonstrating that you don't actually quite know what you're doing. (Edited to add that, having read more about it, which is always a good idea, they're not tweaking by hand per se, although they're still fiddling around with the algo to achieve a specific result, which is a bit like having a theory and choosing facts that support it) It's not that much of a push to go to the stage of saying that Google is censoring itself (which isn't of course anything new). What it does do is given even more credence to the fact that you can't trust a search engine - any of them!
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