Google “murder,” get “abortion”
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Googlebombers turn “Abortion” into second result for “Murder”
Someone has spoofed Google into making the Wikipedia entry for “abortion” into the second result in searches for “murder.” 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.
Reddit, can we PLEASE do something about this?
~ Boing Boing, February 25. Searching Google for “murder” today shows the truth problem has been fixed. Tip of the hat to whomever the clever pro-life “spoofer’ was.
Feb.26, 2011 9:10 am |
Pop Culture |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
If I could forget for even a second that we’re fighting the murder of tiny defenseless humans, I would be rolling on the floor laughing!
I hope the reason some pro-lifer had the time to set that up is that they don’t live anywhere near a pregnancy resource center. Anyone else with lots of time on their hands, we need your help!
On a related note, a dear friend of mine is hated (to the tune of nasty letters from big companies) by our local abortionists because she did a Google analysis of all the phrases most commonly used by women seeking an abortion in our area, and then bought all the domains! Those addresses are now linked to pregnancy support agencies, adoption services, fetal development sites and the like. Since the clinics like to avoid the “a” word, she didn’t think they’d notice, but apparently, they aren’t impressed. :) Fortunately, it’s all legal, and didn’t actually cost her that much.
OMG, Michelle, that’s AWESOME!! What a clever idea! Kudos to your friend!
Good job for your friend Michelle!
You never know who googled murder and saw abortion listed who is pregnant and abortion minded. God knows and uses all things for good.
Michelle – could you put me in touch with your friend?
Hit the Team button on the right to display moderators and click on Chris. Thanks!
That’s awesome, Michelle!
According to one comment on the BoingBoing site, it could actually have been a cause and effect! He/she writes:
I do search engine optimization for a living. I researched this a little bit this morning.
This is not a googlebomb – or at least it wasn’t until BoingBoing accidentally made it one.
First thing I did was an analysis of links in to the wikipedia abortion page. So far as I can tell there are no links to the wikipedia abortion page with the word “murder” in them.
I can find no evidence of web sites promoting linking to this page with the link text “murder”.
Google has algorithms for finding synonyms. It looks for phrases like “x is y” on the internet. Take the word “freedom” it means a lot of things – there are books, movies, songs etc. with that name. Search “freedom is” and you will see all the equivalences.
Now search “abortion is murder” in Google. You get 200k pages that include that phrase. So Google’s algorithm has decided that those two terms are at least related.
Wikipedia is the Google algorithm’s favorite web site. Google returns more Wikipedia articles as search results than from any other site. Since Google has deduced that abortion and murder are related terms, it has helpfully elevated “abortion” as its second article for “murder” on Wikipedia.
You can see which articles are relevant for a particular search term on a Wikipedia by adding “site:en.wikipedia.org” to your search. For example try “homicide site:en.wikipedia.org”. You will see that homicide and murder articles come up #1 and #2. This is because Google has noticed that all over the internet people talk about “homicide” and “murder” together. The #3 article is – abortion. Because all three words are now related.
BoingBoing, and all the other sites that have picked up this story have started talking about “abortion” and “murder” in the same article, often using the phrase “abortion is murder” in the article. All those articles are strengthening the algorithm’s deduction that many people believe “abortion is murder”.
In that sense BoingBoing is probably now the largest contributor to the murder/abortion googlebomb. http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/25/googlebombers-turn-a.html
So: The truth prevails.
For example try “homicide site:en.wikipedia.org”. You will see that homicide and murder articles come up #1 and #2. This is because Google has noticed that all over the internet people talk about “homicide” and “murder” together. The #3 article is – abortion. Because all three words are now related.
This is not the result I get. I get numerous articles on homicide.