Aren’t we so lucky to be ruled by such wise and informed Solons as those who currently populate Congress? The latest example being Sundar Pichai explaining the concept of “Googlebomb” to those who tax and spend our money. Their query being, why do searches for the word “idiot” produce images of President Trump? The answer is that naughty people have made it so, something that we’d really hope those running the nation already knew.
The technique for a Googlebomb is simple enough. Google decides upon what result to return for a query based upon how many links to a result come from something connected to that query. Sure, it’s complicated these days, but that’s the basis of the idea. Links to something mean that something has links to it — Google reads links to determine relevance and importance. So, if we go out and deliberately create links to a certain result, making sure we use a particular word or subject to create the link, then Google will be reading those and associating the two things.
Thus, my little adventure with this technique some years back.
The Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom some time back was John Prescott. He had a plan called Pathfinder. The U.K. was short of decent and cheap housing. Therefore, to solve this problem, Prescott’s Pathfinder plan was that we should knock down a few hundred thousand decent and cheap houses. Yes, knock down, not knock up.
I thought this was a very silly idea, the work of a — well, a word unsuited to a family publication.
Still, after I launched the Googlebomb (by linking my nasty word to the target webpage with a few friends adding their own such links), something interesting happened. If you went to Google and entered the word “fuckwit” then as the first answer, and the “I feel lucky” answer, up came the webpage of John Prescott, deputy prime minister. Contrary to some reports, this wasn’t about his being ill-educated — far from it, I admire his ability to have risen so far. It was purely about this particular plan of his.
Certain people weren’t too happy about this, and Tony Blair is thought to have complained to Google directly. Well, yes, “fuckwit” is a little close to the bone for a senior politician, I agree, and so seemingly did Google. Changes to the algorithm in 2007 made it all very much more difficult to do such a thing again.
Which is exactly what is happening with images of Trump and the word “idiot” as a search term. It’s nothing at all that Google is doing, it’s what some people are doing to exploit Google’s algorithm. People are deliberately using the basic search engine technique in order to create amusing or insulting results.
We can glean one interesting technical detail from this. The general index at Google is very difficult to perform this trick, as a result of those 2007 changes (partly, as I say, inspired by my success). But the images index is very much easier to have such fun with than the general web index. Our technical point is that Google seems not to have made quite the same changes to the image index as it did to the main web index.
By the way, I still insist that destroying cheap and decent housing to solve the shortage of cheap and decent housing is the idea of a complete (well, you know) even if Google no longer agrees with me.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
