Liberal bloggers out to “Google bomb” McCain
by WonkoKevin
“It is time to start bomb bomb bomb, bomb bombing again. No, not Iran, but John McCain’s Google ranking.” In a sign of our Politics 2.0 times, the liberal site MyDD posted suggestions yesterday on how to “Google bomb” John McCain. By “flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.” In McCain’s case, the goal of bombers would be to create web sites that link to negative McCain stories or videos; by embedding words on these new web pages, these words get linked to searches on McCain. This is not the first time Chris Bower at MyDD has led a Google bomb campaign. In October 2006, the NYT reported on Bower’s campaign against 50 Republicans, including Arizonan John Kyl.
A Google search on “John McCain” currently turns up almost all “favorable” results. McCain’s own sites take up the first five slots; other top listings are “objective” sites: listings of McCain on Congresspedia, the Congress Votes database, collected stories from the Washington post, CNN, and CBS News. The NYT endorsement is tenth, and a story in TechCrunch positive to McCain’s taking on Google and Yahoo! is 12th ranked. The only negative link in the top 20 is RealChange.org’s page on McCain’s skeleton closet, and they have a negative page on everybody.
