It would have been nice if the recent algorithm changes that Google made fixed this crap too. Some of you may think that one or the other is funny, but none of it is ultimately helpful. I don’t think begging Reddit for help or engaging in counter Google-bombing is helpful either. Make the web a good place by producing and sharing high quality content and linking to the RELEVANT content of others. Anything else and you’re a parasite contributing to the noise. I’m not even sure this comment valuable to the discourse.

Clearly, the number two search result for “murder” should have something to do with crows.

I am appalled.

Google’s probably getting faster at fixing this sort of thing, though, so it won’t be up too long.

What the practitioners forget, though, is how immature it makes them look. Though the more I think about it, the more I realise these people don’t care about looking immature—they just want to piss off others, and don’t really want to win any significant victories. They just want to fight.

If you want to scare people from aborting Murder should be the second result when you search for abortion.
Not the other way round.

People that look for murder would not be worried specifically interested in abortion.

It is still a semantic abhorrence, to impose such a restricted view of the world on others, but this does not help their cause, nor refrains people from aborting.

Not clever I would say on the pro-life side.

This is not a googlebomb – or at least it wasn’t until BoingBoing accidentally made it one.

First thing I did was an analysis of links in to the wikipedia abortion page. So far as I can tell there are no links to the wikipedia abortion page with the word “murder” in them.

I can find no evidence of web sites promoting linking to this page with the link text “murder”.

Google has algorithms for finding synonyms. It looks for phrases like “x is y” on the internet. Take the word “freedom” it means a lot of things – there are books, movies, songs etc. with that name. Search “freedom is” and you will see all the equivalences.

Now search “abortion is murder” in Google. You get 200k pages that include that phrase. So Google’s algorithm has decided that those two terms are at least related.

Wikipedia is the Google algorithm’s favorite web site. Google returns more Wikipedia articles as search results than from any other site. Since Google has deduced that abortion and murder are related terms, it has helpfully elevated “abortion” as its second article for “murder” on Wikipedia.

You can see which articles are relevant for a particular search term on a Wikipedia by adding “site:en.wikipedia.org” to your search. For example try “homicide site:en.wikipedia.org”. You will see that homicide and murder articles come up #1 and #2. This is because Google has noticed that all over the internet people talk about “homicide” and “murder” together. The #3 article is – abortion. Because all three words are now related.

BoingBoing, and all the other sites that have picked up this story have started talking about “abortion” and “murder” in the same article, often using the phrase “abortion is murder” in the article. All those articles are strengthening the algorithm’s deduction that many people believe “abortion is murder”.

In that sense BoingBoing is probably now the largest contributor to the murder/abortion googlebomb.

first “murder party” (a RPG) but “Abortion” is still on the 2nd place

John: “What is murder?”

Jane: “Abortion is murder.”

John: “Whoa, hold on. Let’s get the actual definition of murder.”

Jane: “Maybe. Or maybe we should look at the news to see how regular people define it…”

I wouldn’t be surprised, and I’d be pleased, if this was payback for what happened with “Santorum”.

It’s just unfortunate because the people behind that cyber-attack are probably only into sex on the internet, where they learned about it.

Truth is, googlebombing is used by the nerds on both sides.

I score this as a win for clever, at the expense of civilization. Like land mines.

Murder

And if a tonne of people do it = Google Bomb

How about us friendly pro-choicers start a new googlebomb for that word. Here, I’ll do it right now: murder.

(yes, I realize that’s going to be nofollowed, but you get my point)

All that “Killing in the name of God”… such irony.