Is AOL Making Political Adjustments To Google Searches?

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the interesting... dept

The concept of Google bombing is not new, and we’ve already discussed what a pointless waste of time it is – sort of the equivalent to scribbling someone’s name and an insult on the bathroom wall. It does a lot more to show the immaturity of those involved than to actually convince anyone of the “insult” being proposed. However, AOL is apparently taking another view of the practice. They’ve edited out the famous “miserable failure” Google bomb result that pointed to George W. Bush. While AOL is free to do what they want, this opens up quite the can of worms. AOL says they did it to get rid of “obviously irrelevant results.” The problem, though, is that a group of people who were upset about the miserable failure Google bomb have been trying to associate the phrase with various other people such as Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton and Jimmy Carter – and AOL saw no problem leaving those links. Once you start editing the search results, it leaves you wide open to questions about why you edited them the way you did. AOL would have been much better off ignoring this matter, and letting the search results fall as they did.