Googlebombing, as you may already know, is a prank where massive amounts of links alter Google’s results for (generally humorous) reasons. It used to be that if you googled “Miserable Failure”, you’d be taken to the George W. Bush bio on the White House website.
It seems that Google has been “un-googlebombing” sites. Sure enough, all those famous Googlebombs have been altered. They claim that their intervention was not manual, but a change in their ranking algorithm.
Is it ethical though? Technically, the search results were that way because of genuine links. Despite their “Don’t be evil” motto, they’re tampering with the results. Should they be doing this? What do you think?
Personally, I think they have a responsibility, as the most widely-used search engine, to not fiddle with their algorithms for frivolously “fixing” things such as Googlebombs.
