Google's WMD Error Message

Chris Corrigan chris at chriscorrigan.com
Sun Jul 6 23:26:17 PDT 2003


The WMD page has been around for a while.  The reason it comes up when
you tell Google you feel lucky is that Google ranks pages based on how
many links those pages have to them.  Many webloggers have been linking
to the WMD error page, driving up its page rank and placing it at the
top of the list for that search term.  The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button
just takes you directly to the top page in the results list.

This practice if done deliberately is known as "Googlewashing" and there
is an interesting article on it here :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html

That article is about how many people suspected that webloggers
Googlewashed the term "second superpower" to change its meaning from the
original as it appeared in a February article referring to the massive
civil society protests of the war in Iraq.  If you search Google for
"the second superpower" now you find the search results heavily skewed
towards an essay that starts out talking about the civilian protests but
them redefines the term to refer to communications technologies such as
weblogs and the Internet in general.

It makes for an interesting peek into the wacky world of
self-organization and the definition of memes.

Chris

---
CHRIS CORRIGAN
Bowen Island, BC, Canada
http://www.chriscorrigan.com
chris at chriscorrigan.com

(604) 947-9236






> -----Original Message-----
> From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of
Artur
> Ferreira da Silva
> Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2003 7:32 PM
> To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
> Subject: Re: Google's WMD Error Message
>
> Hi Linda and Florian:
>
> At 08:05 07-07-2003 +0800, Linda E. Laddin wrote:
> >Dear All,
> >The folks at Google seem to be amusing themselves and us with this
> >parody of an error message, so it may be there for a while.  Be sure
to
> >click on Detect Weapons and Bomb for extra fun!  Cheers,
>
> I am not sure. I made searchs with the "I am lucky" option for
"learning
> organizations", "open Space" (try this one) and "open space
technology"
> and
> found the results I would expect.
>
> On the other hand, this weekend took place an hackers context where
> hackers
> would gain points for changing the contents of known sites.
>
> We will see in the next few days...
>
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