Rick Santorum is sick and tired of “filth” atop Google mission to find his name and wants the organization to stop paying it.
Alexander Burns, Politico (“Rick Santorum contacted Google, says company spreads ‘filth’“):
A Internet search for Santorum has generated some inappropriate results since gay columnist Dan Savage organized an internet campaign to link graphic sexual terms towards the socially conservative senator’s name.
Now, the Republican presidential candidate says he’s convinced Google could take action to remedy the situation, if the company wanted to. “I suspect if something was up there that way about Joe Biden, they’d remove it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let such things as which happen with your business that have an impact on the continent.” He continued: “To have a very business allow that kind of filth being purveyed through the website or through their method is something they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s incorrect.”
[...]
A Google spokesperson answered Santorum by advising that users who wish “content taken from the web should contact the webmaster from the page directly.”
“Google’s serp's can be a reflection in the content and information that can be found online. Users who wish content taken out of the world wide web should contact the webmaster from the page directly,” the spokesperson said. “Once the webmaster takes the page down from the net, it will likely be taken off Google’s serp's through our usual crawling process.”
The spokesperson declared Google does not “remove content from our listings, except in restricted cases for instance illegal content and violations individuals webmaster guidelines.”
I’m no fan of Santorum and, indeed, would almost surely vote to re-elect Barack obama were he my only alternative. Further, Santorum is delusional: If your top 10 results on Google proclaimed him the smartest, most decent man in the world, he’d still be ranked available online for with random hobos in the polls. If your meteorite were to strike the next GOP debate, sparing only Santorum, somebody else would receive the nomination.
Nevertheless, Santorum is right over a narrow point: Google could and really should fix this well-known flaw in their rankings.
As I noted back in February (“Rick Santorum’s Google Problem = Google’s Rick Santorum Problem“) when this issue first got attention, people depend upon Google and other search engines to offer them essentially the most meaningful results concerning the thing they’re searching for. When it comes to a prominent individual, that may typically be their Wikipedia page, their IMDB page (if they’re inside entertainment business), their personal, as well as their bio page in the company utilizing them. Additionally, if they’re currently in the news for something, recent news items-like the Politico story linked here-will often appear excellent for page.
While I don’t claim that they can see the programming involved, I’m pretty knowledgeable about Google’s algorithm along with the constant tinkering the business does to provide the “best” results. Yes, I am aware that is really a subjective matter. But, especially, Google has spent the past a long period aggressively downgrading sites who they deem to get gaming the machine by selling links, doing link-sharing, or otherwise artificially inflating value of a target site. Partly, for the reason that Google’s core clients are actually AdSense, its advertising system. Mostly, though, it’s because the valuation on their core brand-the search engine-is based on people trusting the outcome and never getting junk.
To be fair to Google, the results less difficult better now compared to they were 6 months ago. The “Spreading Santorum” site remains in to begin with, that i always keeping it shouldn’t be. Nevertheless the Rick Santorum Wikipedia page is 2nd and Santorum’s own campaign site is 4th. Among is another Wikipedia page about the “Campaign for your ‘Santorum” neolosim.” This site probably shouldn’t be quite that high, since niche pages typically aren’t, but should in reality be about the first page in the amount of buzz the issue has generated more than a long period of time. Among some of the best sites are a ThinkProgress blog piece on “Rick Santorum’s 12 Most Offensive Statements” plus a recent CNN story titled “Santorum decries handle of bigotry.” These strike me as perfectly legitimate, for the reason that their rankings are “earned” inside the traditional way as opposed to with an orchestrated campaign.
UPDATE: I noted this inside comments but it deserves addition for the main post: They actually have a good doing this. As Danny Sullivan notes, they did it for the Bush “miserable failure” one years back.
Google has finally defused the “Google Bomb” containing returned US President George W. Bush on top of its results in a explore miserable failure. The move wasn’t a post-State Of The Union Address gift for Bush. Instead, it’s portion of a total algorithm change designed to stop such mass link pranks from working.
Searching today now shows the united states White House page carrying Bush’s name is not top listed. Also gone are pages about Michael Moore and former US president Jimmy Carter that have been on the first page of results because of Google bombing actions.
What’s not missing are articles regarding the Google bombing incident itself, including my own article I wrote back January 2004 from the time I worked at Google search Watch. The algorithm change hasn’t impacted these.
It is because the change was designed to stop the pranks from happening rather than legitimate commentary about such activities. Google isn’t saying precisely how this can be being done. But Google says it’s done automatically, without the human intervention.
“It’s completely algorithmic,” said Google spam fighting czar Matt Cutts, adding “we’re not likely to claim it’s Completely perfect.”
That's back in January 2007. Like that particular, the Santorum link bomb is reputed and joked about. They need to take similar steps.
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