Com class 'bombs' Google

A group of UW students this summer took on the Google search engine - and won.

The communication class succeeded in linking the phrase "issues that matter" to The September Project's Web site, eventually pushing the page to the number one result. Instructor Clifford Tatum's class achieved its goal through blogging; they simply referenced the two phrases together enough to change the search term's relevancy on Google.

Tatum's goal with the class was to show how ordinary people can make a difference in mass media. The class reached this goal by pushing The September Project, a UW-funded effort encouraging events in libraries on Sept. 11, to the top of the search engine's rankings with what is called a "Google bomb."

"It's easy for us to talk about the ways in which we can and do participate in new media on a daily basis," explained Tatum. "It's quite another to push the boundaries and experiment with what has become somewhat invisible due to its ubiquity (new media, the Internet, etc.)."

Before search engine "spiders" like Google's combed the Internet, it was a lot easier to influence a Web page's positioning in a search engine. Almost a decade ago, when Yahoo's search technology first appeared on the Web, an individual could enter the relevant data into a submission form and their site would appear at the top of the search engine within a few days.

The technique of a Google bomb was first theorized by Stanford computer science graduate Adam Mathes in April 2001. Mathes first noticed that when he searched Google using the term "Internet rock star" his search would return Internet humorist Ben Brown's website. Mathes noticed that at no point on Brown's page (www.benbrown.com) were the words "Internet" or "rock star" seen together. He figured out that pages that linked to Brown's page made enough references to him using the term that Google's search algorithm ranked Brown as number one.

"Starting individual blogs and deploying a Google bomb are ways that we as individuals participate in new media," said Tatum. "What's interesting about blogging in general and Google bombs in specific are that they each open our eyes to the potential of our participation in media."