ENTER THE WORDS “PEKENG pangulo” [fake president] on your Google browser, and you’ll get a surprising, if mildly subversive result: The website of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Try typing “sinungaling” [liar], and the browser will direct you to Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye’s profile.

The President and her trusted men have just become the latest subjects — or victims — of “Google bombing,” a trick used to manipulate the results yielded by search engines.

An Internet-savvy group of young militants has succeeded in making Ms Arroyo’s website, http://www.kgma.org/, the answer to a search for “pekeng pangulo” on popular search engines like Google or Yahoo!

The militant Youth Demanding Arroyo’s Removal (Youth Dare) yesterday declared a success its online campaign to Google bomb the websites of the President, as well as those of her ardent defenders.

A query for “sira-ulo” [lunatic or fool], for instance, will take one to the official website of the Department of Justice (), presumably a slur on Secretary Raul Gonzalez.

Pimp
A search for “bugaw” [pimp], on the other hand, will show a link to the personal information page of National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales on http://www.i-site.ph/, the online databank of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

Finally, typing “sinungaling” on the browser will lead to Bunye’s profile on the Office of the President website (http://www.op.gov.ph).

Google bombing the President’s website, as well as that of her subordinates, is just one of the many ways Internet users can express their dissent against what they believe to be a fake presidency, said the group’s spokesperson Raymond Palatino.

Denizens of the worldwide web have not had enough of the “Hello Garci” controversy, despite the junking of the impeachment complaint against Ms Arroyo in September, he said in a statement.

A Google bomb is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine.

A page will be ranked higher on Google if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text — the text used in the link. A Google bomb is created if many sites link to a page by using a certain phrase.

If that phrase is entered on the browser, the page to which the most number of websites or blogs are linked using that phrase will appear.

Youth Dare and its member organizations are planning to come out with other creative online activities and projects, such as “Hello Garci” computer games, Palatino said.

News Source: INQ7.net

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 at 9:13 am and is filed under Daily Dose, The Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.