Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Google Bombing now works with Yahoo! too.
In another example of how Google (and now Yahoo!) can be fooled by the link structure of the Web, a law student recently associated the word "waffle" with John Kerry's website, johnkerry.com. After only 8 days, Yahoo! was delivering John Kerry's site as the number one search result for the term "waffle". While this is a good indication of how fast Yahoo's new crawler is, it also shows the inherent failure of depending on links alone to determine relevancy. Google will soon follow and dismisses the problem by saying that "waffle recipe" is a much more common search term than "waffle" so, not many actually users will see the wrong result. I imagine Google just gave many folks the idea to add waffle recipe to their sites that link to johnkerry.com. I would also assume that folks are adding terms like "Belgium Waffles", "Waffle Syrup" and "Waffle House". This problem is often unreported or unnoticed by Google users but can be very frustrating. Prior to the Super Bowl, I was trying to find information related to the playoffs and could only find betting sites using Google that were obviously a link farm.
In another example of how Google (and now Yahoo!) can be fooled by the link structure of the Web, a law student recently associated the word "waffle" with John Kerry's website, johnkerry.com. After only 8 days, Yahoo! was delivering John Kerry's site as the number one search result for the term "waffle". While this is a good indication of how fast Yahoo's new crawler is, it also shows the inherent failure of depending on links alone to determine relevancy. Google will soon follow and dismisses the problem by saying that "waffle recipe" is a much more common search term than "waffle" so, not many actually users will see the wrong result. I imagine Google just gave many folks the idea to add waffle recipe to their sites that link to johnkerry.com. I would also assume that folks are adding terms like "Belgium Waffles", "Waffle Syrup" and "Waffle House". This problem is often unreported or unnoticed by Google users but can be very frustrating. Prior to the Super Bowl, I was trying to find information related to the playoffs and could only find betting sites using Google that were obviously a link farm.
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