The National Journal (via MSNBC.com) reports that some political bloggers are planning strategic Google bombs that they hope will be seen by people searching for information about a candidate as the November elections draws closer. Wikipedia defines a Google bomb as "Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking (called PageRank) of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions." In this case the intentions are clearly political. The National Journal article says liberal bloggers came up with the idea first.
Liberal bloggers had the idea first. Chris Bowers of MyDD outlined the strategy Sunday. He said the plan involves purchasing "Google AdWords that will place each negative article on the most common searches for each Republican candidate. Simultaneously, I will produce an article on MyDD that embeds that negative article into a hyperlink."
Bowers asked bloggers to help add links, and they spent the next few days compiling negative news articles on Republican candidates in about 50 targeted races.
Conservative blogger John Hawkins of Right Wing News learned of the strategy and urged his allies to "fight fire with fire." Hawkins expressed concern the Google-bombing campaign just might work for Democrats.
"Who would be doing a Google search on a particular candidate in the final days of a campaign?" he wrote. "Probably an independent voter who is trying to get more information about a candidate. And if the first article he runs across is a brutal hit piece, well, that could be the information that helps him make up his mind."
You can see the call-to-action from Chris Bowers here on MyDD and here on DailyKos. Conservative blogger John Hawkins post on Right Wing News about a Republican Google bomb can be found here. Hawkins' post also reminds everyone of the Google bomb that turns up George Bush's bio when "miserable failure" is searched on Google. That particular google bomb still works today. Wikipedia has a list of several other political Google bombs.
