Rick Santorum and Google
Alexander Burns, Politico (“Rick Santorum contacted Google, says company spreads ‘filth’“):
A Google search for Santorum has generated some inappropriate results since gay columnist Dan Savage organized an online campaign to link graphic sexual terms to the socially conservative senator’s name.
Now, the Republican presidential candidate says he’s convinced Google could do something to remedy the issue, if the company wanted to. “I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.” He continued: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”
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A Google spokesperson responded to Santorum by advising that users who want “content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly.”
“Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the web. Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly,” the spokesperson said. “Once the webmaster takes the page down from the web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process.”
The spokesperson said that Google does not “remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”
I’m no fan of Santorum and, indeed, would almost surely vote to re-elect President Obama were he my only alternative. Further, Santorum is delusional: If the top 10 results on Google proclaimed him the smartest, most decent man on the planet, he’d still be ranked up there with random hobos in the polls. If a meteorite were to strike the next GOP debate, sparing only Santorum, someone else would get the nomination.
That said, Santorum is right on a narrow point: Google could and should fix this well-known flaw in its rankings.
As I noted back in February (“Rick Santorum’s Google Problem = Google’s Rick Santorum Problem“) when this issue first got attention, people rely on Google and other search engines to give them the most meaningful results about the thing they’re searching for. In the case of a prominent individual, that will almost always be their Wikipedia page, their IMDB page (if they’re in the entertainment business), their personal homepage, and their bio page at the company that employs them. Additionally, if they’re currently in the news for something, recent news items–like the Politico story linked here–will often appear high on the page.
While I don’t claim to understand the programming involved, I’m pretty familiar with Google’s algorithm and the constant tinkering the company does to give the “best” results. Yes, I know that this is a subjective matter. But, in particular, Google has spent the last several years aggressively downgrading sites who they deem to be gaming the system by selling links, engaging in link-sharing, or otherwise artificially inflating the value of a target site. Partly, this is because Google’s core business is actually AdSense, its advertising system. Mostly, though, it’s because the value of their core brand–the search engine–is based on people trusting the results and not getting junk.
In fairness to Google, the results are much better now than they were six months ago. The “Spreading Santorum” site remains in first place, which I continue to maintain it shouldn’t be. But the Rick Santorum Wikipedia page is 2nd and Santorum’s own campaign site is 4th. In between is another Wikipedia page on the “Campaign for the ‘Santorum” neolosim.” This page probably shouldn’t be quite that high, given that niche pages typically aren’t, but should in fact be on the first page given the amount of buzz the issue has generated over a long period of time. Among other top sites are a ThinkProgress blog piece on “Rick Santorum’s 12 Most Offensive Statements” and a recent CNN story titled “Santorum decries charge of bigotry.” These strike me as perfectly legitimate, in that their rankings are “earned” in the traditional way rather than through an orchestrated campaign.
UPDATE: I noted this in the comments but it deserves addition to the main post: They actually have a history of doing this. As Danny Sullivan notes, they did it for the Bush “miserable failure” one years ago.
Google has finally defused the “Google Bomb” that has returned US President George W. Bush at the top of its results in a search on miserable failure. The move wasn’t a post-State Of The Union Address gift for Bush. Instead, it’s part of an overall algorithm change designed to stop such mass link pranks from working.
A search today now shows the US White House page carrying Bush’s name is no longer top listed. Also gone are pages about Michael Moore and former US president Jimmy Carter that were on the first page of results due to Google bombing actions.
What’s not missing are articles about the Google bombing incident itself, including my own article I wrote back in January 2004 from when I worked at Search Engine Watch. The algorithm change hasn’t impacted these.
This is because the change is designed to stop the pranks from happening rather than legitimate commentary about such activities. Google isn’t saying exactly how this is being done. But Google says it’s done automatically, without any human intervention.
“It’s completely algorithmic,” said Google spam fighting czar Matt Cutts, adding “we’re not going to claim it’s 100 percent perfect.”
That was back in January 2007. Like that one, the Santorum link bomb is widely known and joked about. They should take similar steps.
Source:outsidethebeltway
