Google bomb refers to „the practice of causing a website to rank highly in web search engine results for irrelevant, unrelated or off-topic search terms by linking heavily“ [0]. Most known Google bombs are motivated by political activism, commercial use [0] or for humorous purposes [1].
One prominent example is about the former US senator Rick Santorum. After he made a homophobic statement in 2003 the blogger and journalist Dan Savage successfully redefined the name of Rick Santorum. Savage and his readership made a collective effort to spread the new definition – by clicking, rephrasing or linking the website. For nearly a decade the website with his definition was at the top of google’s search results for ‚Rick Santorum‘. Then, during 2012 Republican nominations the website dropped in ranking – potentially due to an update in the Google’s page rank algorithm. Gillespie (2017) [2] provides a very detailed analysis about this case.
Around the same time the Blogger George Johnston [3] successfully linked the search term ‚miserable failure‘ to the entry of George W. Bush’s biography on the White House website. Interestingly one still finds Johnston’s original call for action [4]:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing
[1] Bar-Ilan, J. (2007). Google bombing from a time perspective. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3), 910-938.
[2] Gillespie, T. (2019). Algorithmically recognizable: Santorum's Google problem, and Google's Santorum problem. In The Social Power of Algorithms (pp. 63-80). Routledge.
[3] https://oldfashionedpatriot.blogspot.com/
[4] https://oldfashionedpatriot.blogspot.com/2003/10/