Illustration by Leo Espinosa |
This is not a preposterous question. Just type the words miserable failure as a search query, and see the top result. The document that Google thinks is most relevant is a biography of the 43rd president of the United States, George W. Bush.
Before some of you write angry letters to the editor about the liberal bias infecting search engines, consider this: The results for “miserable failure” were not directly shaped by anyone at Google. Instead, Web users manipulated the rankings by altering their own Web pages. The practice is called Googlebombing.
This kind of group intervention is possible because of the ingenious way that Google calculates its search results, a much-scrutinized system called PageRank. The exact PageRank search recipe is the digital-age version of the original Coca-Cola formula—known only to the wizards inside Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters. But it involves two known variables.
PageRank was designed to deal with the epidemic of informational overload that accompanied the Web’s explosive growth in the mid-1990s. If you search for a relatively common word like paleontology, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of pages that contain the word. A search engine is not much use unless it finds the most valuable pages and returns them as the top results. Theoretically, Google could have hired thousands of humans to read all the pages in its index (there are around 4 billion), but that approach is prohibitively expensive. Instead, the company decided to outsource the problem: They tapped the free labor of all the people in the world who were already creating Web pages.
Most Web pages are littered with hypertext links to other Web sites, since linking is one of the Web’s fundamental innovations. Google’s software recognizes those links as votes. Every time someone somewhere on the Web decides to link to a page, Google tracks that link and files it away as an endorsement of the page’s content. The PageRank system tallies all the votes for every page it has found on the Web. Pages that have attracted more links become more prominent in Google’s rankings, while pages with few links get pushed down the list. This enables Google to separate out the signal from the noise online. When you query “paleontology” you get more than half a million results, but the top 10 are the 10 pages that have received the most links. Because people on average are more likely to link to sites that they find valuable, most of the time quality rises to the top.
The second ingredient necessary for Googlebombing is a lesser-known quirk of the PageRank algorithm. Let’s say you create a link from your page to a site devoted to the life of baseball great Willie Mays. Google tracks that link as a vote for the quality of the Willie Mays site, but it also pays attention to the words you use to describe the site. If you link to the Mays site with the phrase “Barry Bonds’s godfather,” Google learns to associate the phrase with that site, even if it doesn’t mention Barry Bonds. If enough people on the Web publish the same link with the same phrase, eventually Google will serve up the Mays site as the top result for the search query “Barry Bonds’s godfather.”
In this example, Google has actually learned something about Willie Mays that wasn’t included in the primary site, since Willie Mays is in fact Barry Bonds’s godfather. The learning comes out of watching patterns of linking activity across the entire Web and looking for commonalities and trends in all that data. That knack for pattern recognition is central to Google’s intelligence, but it can be exploited. Encourage enough people to link to a given page with a specific phrase and you can manipulate Google’s results. This is how Google came to think of George W. Bush as a miserable failure. A computer programmer named George Johnston linked to the president’s biography with the “miserable failure” phrase and encouraged other like-minded Netizens to put up similar links from their sites.
If this makes you think that the mighty oracle of Google can be easily manipulated, keep in mind that Googlebombs are vastly more effective with unusual search phrases, like “miserable failure.” (The original Googlebomb was a prank among Web designers, pointing to one designer’s home page with the phrase “talentless hack.”) You won’t be able to redirect the world to your home page by Googlebombing the phrase “Britney Spears,” because there are millions of existing links referencing Britney Spears; your Googlebomb would be like a tiny sparkler next to that massive arsenal.
