Word of the Day: Googlebombing and Googleboobing

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Word of the Day: Googlebombing and Googleboobing

Monday, April 20th, 2009 | Word of the Day |

Googlebombing - A coordinating linking to a page using anchor text to influence search engine results:

Also called “linkbombing,” the most famous Googlebomb was of course the search for the phrase “failure” that produced a link to the current US President, George W. Bush. Some other Googlebombs included associating the search term “waffles” with Senator John Kerry and “talentless hack” with Adam Mathes, but not all Googlebombs were created to slander—some users Googlebombed the word “Jew” to stop pointing to a hate site and instead directed the term to point to the Wikipedia entry on Jewish people.

Googleboobing is a new word that I just made up. It’s the same idea as Googlebombing, but applied to images rather than Web pages. It requires many people to link to a nude image with link text to increase the Google rank of that image for those words.

So far I only know of one example. If you go to Google Image Search, turn SafeSearch off, and search for “new bathroom” one of the first results is for a nude woman in a bathtub. Not safe for work screenshot here for strictly academic purposes, of course.

(And it’s a good thing I took the screenshot in November, 2008. That picture no longer appears in Google Image results.)

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Tags: words i invented