Google Bombing — Just a Prank or Democracy in Action?

Posted December 7th, 2006 by Char Lyn

For the past couple of years, Googling “Martin Luther King” would return the site MartinLutherKing-dot-org* as the top result due in part to a Google bomb by the site’s sponsor—the white supremacist organization Stormfront.org. This example and others like it have pushed educators to teach information literacy to help students refine and validate the search results they get on the Web.

On Nov. 19, an education blogger named Tom Hoffman decided to do something about it. He proposed Google bombing several other Martin Luther King sites to drive MartinLutherKing-dot-org off the first page of results, or at least below the fold of the first page. The next day, a few notable bloggers, including Robert Scoble, picked up on Tom’s blog and added the Google bomb to theirs.

You can view Tom’s The Week in Review to see early results of his campaign. When writing this post, my search for “martin luther king” showed that MartinLutherKing-dot-org has already moved down to 4 on Google, 38 on Yahoo, 1 on MSN, and didn’t appear in the first 10 pages of results on Ask.com. But, it hasn’t even been two weeks, and it takes time to update search engines. I’ll be interested to check back in another week or two and see how the rankings have changed.

Most people recognize the Internet as the ultimate incarnation of the First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech. Perhaps Tom Hoffman’s exercise has shown us that the Internet can also be an expression of democracy. If enough people don’t like what they see, they can vote with the links in their blogs to change that all important popularity meter — the page rank.

* You may notice that I am intentionally not using the actual URL or linking to MartinLutherKing-dot-org in an effort not to promote the site.

** If you are interested in other sites that can help teach information literacy, see Alan November’s list of favorite “sites to validate” for educators.

Entry Filed under: Blogs