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Comment by brc | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Google kill the 'miserable failure' google bomb of years ago?

If I were Google's team I would kill this just because it looks very bad for Google. Let's assume Santorum goes on to win the Republican Primaries and then the Presidency. Is President Santorum going to be receptive or agressive if someone from Google (or the search industry in general) turns up on their doorstep?

It's the sort of thing that stays with people for a long time, rightly or wrongly.

This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known.

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> Didn't Google kill the 'miserable failure' google bomb of years ago?

From what I recall, that googlebomb is widely believed to have been "defused" algorithmically, by devaluing anchor text which didn't match the target page at all (e.g, "miserable failure" didn't appear on GWB's page). Those measures only really defused googlebombs to unsuspecting sites; they wouldn't help for sites which are intentionally trying to rank for a term that they are relevant for!

> Is President Santorum going to be receptive or agressive if someone from Google (or the search industry in general) turns up on their doorstep?

So Google should start manually tweaking sites supporting public figures in order to garner favors from them in case they get in a position of power?

Talk about setting a bad precedent.

Please read the comment fully next time:

"This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known."

> This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known

You're still missing the point. It should not be up to the search engine to do that: just let the search engine reflect what the web thinks.

Why stop at pranks against public figures?

If I were Google's team I would kill this just because it looks very bad for Google.

killing it would probably look even worse, as google would be attacked for censorship.

also, the site in question comes up first on bing, yahoo, and duckduckgo.

I just searched "Santorum" on DDG, and every result for the first few screens is in fact about Rick Santorum the politician and not about that disgusting definition.

Huh, I did this just now and it's the top result.

Screencapped: https://img.skitch.com/20120105-x7fb17is53yx99pw61bfur6g57.j...

edit: Ah ha, it only shows up if you have safe search off.

Maybe Google should follow suit and flag the "santorum" site as requiring safe search. It does focus on sexual content, after all, and this way they don't have to tweak their algorithm.

The "miserable failure" bomb was a different issue that exposed a problem with their algorithm, which was associating search terms with a web page even though that page had nothing to do with the keywords. In this case the search term and web page are sympatico.

I don't think Google should censor their search results to get on the good side of a politician. Google's mission is to organize information, not to satisfy lawmakers.

Another example to read the comment fully: "This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known."

Organising information is one thing - allowing pranksters to prank public figures is something else.

We might all laugh because we don't share the targets politics - but one day it will happen to someone we do support or care about.

Your argument is that google should kowtow to power?

No thanks.

Also please read the comment fully: "This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known."

My argument is that search engines of all stripes shouldn't allow themselves to host public pranks. That itself is a bad precedent.

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