Google Bomb:

This term gives reference to a weakness in the Google algorithm which made it possible for pranksters or slanderers to associate certain websites with libellous phrases by making the website appear when a user enters this search phrase.

A recent example which went through the media was the fact that a page containing the biography of George W. Bush came up as one of the first search results on Google for the search phrase “miserable failure”.

All that such “jokers” needed to do to plant such a “bomb” was to place several link s to the target site from their own pages (or get other pages to link by whatever means) and use the negative phrase as anchor text.

Google has overcome this weakness by implementing so called latent semantic indexing (LSI) in their algorithm. For more information see under this entry.

[ Bomb comes probably from Latin bombus = a booming sound]

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