Sarkozy and U2 are Google-bombed

If you type the words Trou du cul du web (arsehole of the web) into Google, who gets the top results at the moment? President Sarkozy’s campaign website, www.sarkozy.fr.

Basically Nicolas Sarkozy is being “Google-bombed”.

A Google bomb (or “link bomb”) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to raise the ranking of a given page in results from a Google search, often with humorous or political intentions
- Wikipedia

Sarkozy has been pushing through some controversial anti-piracy measures lately, so some French bloggers got together and decided to do a Google bomb.

Through their concerted efforts, the sarkozy.fr site quickly percolated to the top of the search rankings.

Sarkozy comes top when you look for web arseholes. Also note the particular Sponsored Link (on the right-hand side) that Google.ie serves up. Carla should be told

Then the story started hitting the headlines in France, and is bound to go much further afield. Here’s a typical sample from this morning’s  news websites:

• Sarkozy attaqué au Google Bombing
• Nicolas Sarkozy pris sous les feux d’un Google bombing
• Nicolas Sarkozy victime du trou du cul du Web
• Le site internet www.sarkozy.fr victime de “Google bombing”

The French government was furious of course, because they didn’t want the world to know that, um, there’s a web arsehole in the Élysée Palace.

But the more that the story is reported, the more it feeds the phenomenon, in a bigger and bigger feedback loop.

Google’s French arm reacted by basically saying “tough”:

“Si vous tapez une certaine succession de mots sur notre moteur de recherche, le premier résultat qui apparait en ce moment est le site www.sarkozy.fr… Nous n’excusons pas cette pratique, ni aucune autre pratique visant à altérer l’intégrité de nos résultats de recherche, mais nous ne sommes pas plus enthousiasmés par l’idée de modifier manuellement nos résultats pour empêcher de telles informations d’apparaitre.”

The laundering Minister

It’s not the first time that French politicians have been Google bombed in a big way.

At the end of 2005, groups opposing the DADVSI copyright bill, which was being proposed by Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, managed to link ministre blanchisseur (“laundering minister”) to an article recalling his conviction for money laundering.

For months after, a search just for the one word ministre or just for blanchisseur would do the same thing.

U2 victims too

In Ireland, Bono & Co may be in town tonight to play the Croke Park stadium in Dublin, as they do every four years, but they have come in for much criticism after moving much of their business out of their native country to the Netherlands in 2006 to minimise their taxes.

So the band were also Google bombed – as you can see when you Google the words tax dodging wankers.

We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

- Google’s standard party line when there are high-profile Google bombs