It's election time in the US and the dirty tricks and underhanded tactics we've grown to expect in their political landscape have ramped up again, with this year's crop of Republican (conservative) hopefuls getting negative press via Google.
According to the NYT, clever folks who know how to game the search engine (also known as Google Bombing), are manipulating the its search algorithms to call up unsavoury news items about certain candidates as their top or first page results.
If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks, searching Google for "Jon Kyl," the Republican senator from Arizona now running for re-election, will produce high among the returns a link to an April 13 article from The Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly.
Mr. Kyl "has spent his time in Washington kowtowing to the Bush administration and the radical right," the article suggests, "very often to the detriment of Arizonans."
Searching Google for "Peter King," the Republican congressman from Long Island, would bring up a link to a Newsday article headlined "King Endorses Ethnic Profiling."
Gaming the system has generated some (ahem) hilarious results in the past. For old times' sake, type "miserable failure" into the keyword search just to see what happens. If that floats your boat, you can try "liar" too.
