April 13, 2004
Google bombing for Good
"If you've ever Googled the word Jew, you may have noticed that an antisemitic hate site, Jew Watch, inexplicably and disturbingly comes up as the top result on what is beyond a doubt the most frequently relied upon search engine in the world."
The anti-Semites have been a-Google-bombing. The most effective way to counter the racists is to Google-bomb back. If you have a website, please consider placing the following code on it soemwhere: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew">Jew</a>, which should look like this on your page: Jew.
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Done and Done.
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Moi aussi.
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Jewwatch: Keeping a Close Watch on Jewish Communities & Organizations Worldwide I think someone said this on Metafilter too, but it it is frightening how the word watch is used these days. It all feels very, well, very Nazi, doesn't it? (Here's a metafilter comment showing the rather worrying use of the term) The Metafilter post, actually, kind of undermined itself (although it wasn't initially about the googlebomb attempt) by linking to the jew watch site, and using the word jew in the link. Also, you'd have though Google would have changed their algorithms, considering google bombing seems to be so very simple these days. This could all get very political, very quickly. Especially as the best way to hide information, as all Governments know, is to release it, but just make it very difficult to find. Gaming google could quite easily achieve this. And I still like googles number one ranked page for the term nice tits.
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que sara sara
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Good post, Skrik. I've put a link on my site and hope everybody else does too.
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Meh. It's much more likely to be a simple consequence of the language choices of the haters. "Nice" people tend to say: "So-and-so is Jewish". Nasty people say: "So-and-so is a Jew", or even "The Jew So-and-so". Also, only people with an unusual definition of "Jew" are going to hyperlink it.
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consider it linked.
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Strangely, I have never googled the word "Jew". Why exactly would I?
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So you could get outraged?
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This seems to be working already. Jew is number three on the list at Google right now.
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Google also seems to have this statement coming up at the top of the search - mainly covering their butts, but probably a good idea to open discussion in any case.
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This attempt to game google appears to be having a negative effect - the wikipedia article was ranked second yesterday.
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As a side note, there is a rather misguided e-mail petition going around saying something to the effect of "If we get 50,000 signatures, Google will take this anti-Semitic site out of its search results!" Um, right. I have written up a brief explanation of why a petition won't do bupkes, and which you can find (warning: self-link approaching) here. It will be pretty obvious stuff for anybody who is at all websavvy (which is to say, anybody who is posting here at Monkeyfilter), but I mention it mainly because, when I got forwarded the e-mail from a less websavvy older relative, I wanted to find a simple explanation of why it didn't make sense. I could find one, so I wrote one myself; feel free to forward it to anybody who needs the explainifyin'.
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"Nice" people tend to say: "So-and-so is Jewish". Nasty people say: "So-and-so is a Jew" My ex-housemate, who is Jewish, used to try to "educate" me with a game called "Jew!", wherein she'd point out people on TV or on the street and ask me if they were or were not Jewish. If I picked right (according to her Jewdar, anyways) we'd both yell "JEW!" at the top of our lungs and dance around clapping our hands while she sang a little song in Hebrew. There's no moral to that story, save perhaps that it demonstrates what a lovable nutball my ex-housemate is.
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We did it! Wiki is on top of the Google Result!