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History of Google bomb (link bomb)

January 24th, 2007 · No Comments

The first Google bombs were probably accidental. Users would discover that a particular search term would bring up an interesting result, leading many to believe that Google’s results could be manipulated intentionally. The first Google bomb known about by a significant number of people was the one that caused the search term “more evil than Satan himself” to bring up the Microsoft homepage as the top result. Numerous people have made claims to having been responsible for the Microsoft Google bomb, though none have been verified.

In September of 2000 the first Google bomb with a verifiable creator was created by Hugedisk Men’s Magazine, a now-defunct online humor magazine, when it linked the text “dumb motherfucker” to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise. A Google search for this term would return the pro-Bush online store as its top result. Hugedisk had also unsuccessfully attempted to Google bomb an equally derogatory term to bring up an Al Gore-related site. After a fair amount of publicity the George W. Bush-related merchandise site retained lawyers who sent a cease and desist letter to Hugedisk, thereby ending the Google bomb.

In April 6, 2001 in an article in the online magazine uber.nu Adam Mathes is credited with coining the term “Google Bombing.” In the article Mathes details his connection of the search term “talentless hack” to the website of his friend Andy Pressman by recruiting fellow webloggers to link to his friend’s page with the desired term. However, Archimedes Plutonium is known to have used the phrase “search engine bombing” (and variants, including “searchengine bombing” and “searchenginebombed”) on Usenet as early as 1997

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