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New "Google Bomb" links murder to abortion

Bombs away

Somebody - or some group - decided to make a political point on Friday with a Google-bombing attack linking the words murder and abortion.

The practice, which has been used on occasion by advocates over the years, takes advantage of the way that Google ranks link in order to skew search results. In this case, a search on the word "murder" pulls up a Wikipedia definition as the first result, followed by a Wikipedia definition for the word "abortion."

Even though Google has taken steps to shore up its system against manipulation, Google-bombs such as this one still find their mark. The company's search-rank algorithm will list page results for a particular search phrase higher if there are lots of other pages linked to it using similar anchor text.

Credit goes to BoingBoing for first taking notice. As the tech website noted, "However you feel about abortion, this Wikipedia page is pretty clearly not the second-most relevant document regarding murder on the entire English-speaking World Wide Web."

Duh.

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