Google pone fin a los Google Bombings
Viernes, Enero 26th, 2007En este post oficial, Google anuncia que se ha comenzando a “minimizar el efecto de muchos de los ‘Google Bombings‘” dentro de las páginas de resultados del buscador web y, para ello se ha “mejorado el análisis de la estructura de enlaces de la WWW”.
Podemos ver los resultados de esta nueva política de Google en búsquedas como ‘ladrones‘ (en la que antes aparecía en primera posición el sitio web de la SGAE), ‘miserable+failure‘ (en la que ya no aparece la página web de George Bush) o ‘jew‘ (en la que la página de JewWatch aparece ahora en tercera posición aunque se sigue mostrando un mensaje aclaratorio).
Google no evitaba estos ‘Google Bombings’ porque no quería y, de hecho, en septiembre de 2005 tuvo que salir al paso para explicar que estas situaciones son posibles gracias al propio funcionamiento del buscador: a mayor cantidad de links hacia una determinada página web, mayor probabilidad de aparecer en la primera posición de una determinada búsqueda.
Sin embargo, Google reconoce que muchas personas piensan que el hecho de que aparezca la página web de una determinada organización o persona pública en primera posición cuando se busca una palabra (generalmente ofensiva) es una opinión subjetiva del buscador y no (como realmente es) una consecuencia de su propio algoritmo. Por ello, después de muchos meses de haberlo dejado ‘aparcado’, han tomado la decisión de “modificar a mano” los resultados para determinadas consultas afectadas por ‘Google Bombings’, por lo que cabe suponer que otras búsquedas que no tienen relación con este asunto no deberían verse afectadas.
Toda la información se puede obtener del blog Oficial de la central de webmasters de Google (copio/pego el texto, en inglés):
We wanted to give a quick update about “Googlebombs.” By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs), but if you’d like to get more details about this topic, read on.
First off, let’s back up and give some background. Unless you read all about search engines all day, you might wonder “What is a Googlebomb?” Technically, a “Googlebomb” (sometimes called a “linkbomb” since they’re not specific to Google) refers to a prank where people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank for an obscure or meaningless query. Googlebombs very rarely happen for common queries, because the lack of any relevant results for that phrase is part of why a Googlebomb can work. One of the earliest Googlebombs was for the phrase “talentless hack,” for example.
People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. 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.
The next natural question to ask is “Why doesn’t Google just edit these search results by hand?” To answer that, you need to know a little bit about how Google works. When we’re faced with a bad search result or a relevance problem, our first instinct is to look for an automatic way to solve the problem instead of trying to fix a particular search by hand. Algorithms are great because they scale well: computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in many different languages. That’s what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages. We wouldn’t claim that this change handles every prank that someone has attempted. But if you are aware of other potential Googlebombs, we are happy to hear feedback in our Google Web Search Help Group.
Again, the impact of this new algorithm is very limited in scope and impact, but we hope that the affected queries are more relevant for searchers.
Vía Dirson.
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