'Abortion' Second Result In Google Search For 'Murder'

'Abortion' Second Result In Google Search For 'Murder'

Type in a Google search for the word "murder," and a link to a Wikipedia entry for "abortion" is the second search result that appears.

Boing Boing, which first observed the results, noted that Googlebombers have "spoofed Google," adding, "However you feel about abortion, this Wikipedia page is pretty clearly not the second-most relevant document regarding murder on the entire English-speaking World Wide Web."

Googlebombing, as Geekosystem explains, is "the practice of gaming Google search results by systematically coordinating links from a number of sites to a given webpage to bump up its ranking within a given Google search."

Previous instances of Googlebombing have included causing a biography of George W. Bush to appear under the results for searches for "miserable failure" or searches for "liar" to return results linking to Tony Blair.

Google wrote of Googlebombs in 2007, "Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs."

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