Scientology and the "Dangerous Cult" Search Bomb

Scientology and the "Dangerous Cult" Search Bomb - Recently a "search bomb" was unleashed on Scientology.org, the main website of Scientology. This search bomb made it so that if the words "dangerous cult" were searched for on Google, the first website that would pop up would be Scientology.org. This bad publicity comes on the heels of the Church of Scientology pulling a now infamously unflattering video of Tom Cruise, Scientology's number one spokesman.

So how does search bombing work?

Very simply if enough people create links with the words that they wanted to have result in a certain site than that would be the first result. For instance if some one really wanted to have the words "miserable failure" go to a George W. Bush biography than they would have to get enough webmasters to link those words to that site on their website or blog and that site would creep up the rankings and with enough links it would be number 1. Also, the more obscure the search words are, the easier it is, or the less links are needed, to make that site the number one ranked site.

About a year ago Google changed their algorithms on how rankings are made to try to thwart these types of bombings. While they have effectively stopped many of these types of bombings from having such big results, but it is impossible to stop all of the bombings if there is a very large volume of people participating, just like with the Scientology search bombing.

Search bombing was somewhat of a sport and it hits its peak in about 2004. In the time that it was a hot topic there several very famous search bombs to hit Google.

One was set up so that if the user typed "famous French military victories" a screen would come up with a error message that said "did you mean famous French military defeats?"

Another happened during the time that John Kerry was running for president. If one was to look up the search term "waffle" at that period in time a site about John Kerry would be the first search result.

Possibly the most famous Google search bomb happened in 2003. During that time if one search for "miserable failure" a biography of George W. Bush would be the first search result.