Daily Mail journalist suffers the wrath of bloggers
“Julie Moult is an idiot”. That’s if you believe a Google search for her name, anyway. Almost every link on the front page of the results is accusing the Daily Mail journalist of idiocy. It’s a rather ironic turn of events for the poor lady.
Moult wrote an awful story last week describing how the image illustrating this post was the result of a “googlebomb”, because it shows up at the top when you search for Labour MP “Hazel Blears” on Google. What a load of rubbish.
Actually, before we get too much further, I should explain Googlebombing for the unfamiliar. It’s basically when people write about something, and intentionally link using a specific anchor text so that a search for that anchor text results in a particular link. The best known example is from a few years back, when webmasters linked the phrase “miserable failure” to the official White House biography of George Bush. Then when people search for “miserable failure”, voila, up comes the biography.
As the Hazel Blears story wasn’t a co-ordinated effort, it’s not a Googlebomb. It’s just a consequence of Google’s algorithm trying to find relevant stuff. Bloggers jumped on her error immediately, as did B3TA, and co-coordinating with glee, they all titled their posts “Julie Moult is an idiot”. That’s how it works, Julie…
Julie Moult is an idiot (via the Register)
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