Monday, March 24

The new Googlebomb

Here’s what Google Suggest thinks people are searching on when you type the phrase ‘Indians are’:

Naturally, it’s been Googlebombed

More results stuffing — 111K results for that last phrase? Really?

I tried this with other countries in the subcontinent, but the volume of queries was too small for suggestions to be offered.

(via Antonio Cangiano and Reddit)


11 comments

  1. 1Kinjal

    Its shame but nice find…

  2. 2ashvin

    That’s hilarious. Btw that last phrase “india is my country…sisters” is the first line of the Indian Pledge (of allegiance). So it might not be results stuffing.

  3. 3meena

    wow, i thought this was a joke until i googled “indians are”!

    i wonder if this is (a) the result of indians googling themselves, which might explain the high numbers of searches due to the large population. or if (b) this is the result of very awful impression indians are making upon others!!

    if it’s the latter case, i wonder if the bad impressions are based on bad experiences in personal interactions with indians or on crazy news stories like that often pop up?

  4. 4Minkey Chief

    And then I find this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6161691.stm.

  5. 5Cherez

    fun! so far i’ve discovered ‘turks are…gay’ and ‘britney spears is…islam.’ i smell a new hobby

  6. 6chachaji

    The reason the results for how the ‘Indians are…’ completions are distributed is because those are the most common discussions on Indian blogs - and South Asian American blogs too. Just look around yourself!

    But the fundamental mistake I see with the ‘Google Suggest’ idea - is the premise that people are more likely to be looking for things that are already out there in heaps. This is never how my searches go. I always have to refine and re-refine my searches before I find what I really want. It is defensible to base a completion algorithm on actual searches on related strings that other people have done (perhaps matched by your country, whether you are at work or at home, etc). But it is completely another to base a completion algorithm on the multiplicity of partially-matched strings that are already in the content corpus. Google promotes blogging and provides free hosting. It also comes in and archives the blogs into its content corpus. So they are already on two sides of the search - they provide the engine and increasingly, they host the content. Sometime ago, they had cataloged all the Usenet newsgroups into the content corpus. Now they want to drive the search itself by ‘helping’ you to complete the search string, trying to influence the last thing left in the equation - you. They really seem to be running out of good ideas.

    BTW, on the ‘Pakistanis are’

  7. 7manish

    Now they want to drive the search itself by ‘helping’ you to complete the search string, trying to influence the last thing left in the equation - you.

    What is search without search? Content.

  8. 8chachaji

    What is search without search? Content.

    What is search without your intent? Their directed search into their content.

  9. 9Runa

    [Ed.: flameage quoted]

    Stereotype much?

    Manish,

    Do you support this kind of open ethnicity bashing?

  10. 10umber desi

    Runa,

    I think it is best to ignore people like edsa, I believe it is a troll.

  11. 11manish

    Please don’t feed the trolls.


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Please don't feed the trolls.