Google has reacted to how racist searches can bring up the White House and other locations by promising to extend its "Googlebomb" protection to Google Maps.
Google has apologized for the situation and promised a fix is on the way. From its blog post today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID-kjYvTQxk
In January 2007, Google finally put a Googlebomb fix in place. In short, the fix looks to see if the words in a link pointing at a page actually appear on the page itself. If not, then the page is far less likely to rank for those words. Since the Bush page didn't have the words "miserable failure" on it, it no longer ranked for that phrase. When it made use of the word "failure" a few months later, it briefly ranked for the word "failure" until that word disappeared.
Now Google says it's going to use the same technology to solve its problem with Google Maps:
Building upon a key algorithmic change we developed for Google Search, we've started to update our ranking system to address the majority of these searches--this will gradually roll out globally and we'll continue to refine our systems over time. Simply put, you shouldn't see these kinds of results in Google Maps, and we're taking steps to make sure you don't.
With Google Maps, there really isn't any evidence of an orchestrated campaign to rank any of these places for any of these terms, as had been the situation with Googlebombs. Rather, it was an unfortunate side-effect of using the entire web to help determine the context of local places.
Still, the Googlebomb fix will likely work the same. As long as these places don't use any of these slurs or derogatory terms on their own sites or in their own business listings, they probably won't be relevant for them. Likely, Google will also create a filter of certain words that no site is allowed to be relevant for.
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(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)
http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/Kl6nltjlQw0/googlebomb-fix-for-racist-maps-221466
