Click here – Google bombing at its finest
by Chris on Mar.22, 2007, under Tech
I was explaining the concept of Google Bombing to a colleague the other day, and it struck me that Google’s method of ranking pages based on anchor text (the descriptive text people click on to visit a particular site) must mean that the word ‘here’ must point to some pretty inane places, seeing as just about every webpage has a link somewhere that says ‘click HERE to whatever’.
Checking this in Google (click here) returns mostly application download pages, in rough order of appearance:
Acrobat, Quicktime, Realplayer, IE7 (ugh), Winzip, Firefox, Winamp and Google Earth, with DivX bringing up the rear of the leaders.
So I suppose this gives a rough guide to how widely publicised the various apps are on the web, but more importantly, shows another (albeit minor) flaw in Google’s Pagerank system.
March 22nd, 2007 on 7:23 pm
It’s not a great example though. What would you actually be searching for when Googling “here”?
This, perhaps?
March 22nd, 2007 on 9:56 pm
This is here.
I thought we might search over there.