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| My favorite type of bomb is the glitterbomb, seen here. |
For a bit this year, you type "idiot" and you get pics of the U.S. President. It starts when British protesters pushed Green Day's song American Idiot to the top of the UK charts during a presidential visit (in July), which was then followed by a Reddit-storm of sub-articles embedded with images of the President and the word "idiot".
This is called google bombing, and it's totally new to me and totally awesome. Culture jamming of the digital age at its finest. Although it's been happening since search engines began, with the first target being the Microsoft homepage.
I always prefer to use common nouns over proper, so let's call it link bombing, eh?
Notes:
Google hearing sees 'idiot' trending
Dec 2018, BBC
Opposite of googlebombing is googlewashing. But with that, watch out for the Streisand Effect.
And an interesting side note:
Google countered the most popular Google bombs such as "miserable failure" leading to George W. Bush and Michael Moore; now, search results direct to pages about the Google bomb itself. So for example a search for "miserable failure" no longer brings a picture of Bush, but the Wikipedia article defining Google bomb.
Can't stop there, how about spamdexing, which is what I might call backend bombing, because you're changing the html itself to recategorize the page and show higher in results.
Finally, see the Dan Savage campaign to define the word "santorum" after Santorum's run for president. It does not mean anal sex, btw, but is a great example of how reality - for those who's reality is in large part mediated by a search engine - is duplicitous.
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