MSNBC points out that GoogleBombing is alive and well in campaign ’06. Organized bands of partisans are working to drive negative articles higher in the rankings for their political opponents in a new form of participative democracy. The classic example of this technique took place for the ’04 Presidential campaign, when a search for the term ‘miserable failure’ started turning up what Google themselves call ‘odd results’. (more history here.)

The incident marked something of a turning point in the SEO world causing links to replace content (and tags) as the broadly accepted ranking powerhouse. More importantly, it was an early chink in the armor of Google’s public image, forcing most people to consider for the first time exactly how it was that Google decided who shows up at the top of search results.

Today, Google is a habit and a verb, but we’d all benefit from more scrutiny and skepticism of their results. The algorithm has made impressive progress in many areas over the past two years, but we’re still very far from any kind of true relevance meritocracy in far too many results. Towards that, I’m glad to see another round of publicity on how and why search results are manipulated.

I’ve heard that the original GoogleBombing to get the G.W. Bush page to the top rank for ‘miserable failure’ took only 60 inbound links. Of course, it’s hard to say at this point whether Google really was manipulated in this case or if something in their algorithm was actually able to predict the future.