Google defuses 'link bombs'
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - US President George W. Bush is no longer Google's top response to Internet searches for "miserable failure."
Queries for French military victories no longer take one to "defeats."
Links to web pages about Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva no longer pop up in searches in Portuguese for "drunken despot."
And Russian Internet users that type "enemy of the people" into Google are not directed to a biography of that nation's leader, Vladimir Putin.
The Mountain View, California-based search colossus says it has finally defused such "Googlebombs," search term results rigged by clever outsiders to make comic or critical commentary.
"By improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs," Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini of Google wrote in a company weblog.
"Now, we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead."
Google described the programming change as "pretty small," saying there were fewer than 100 well-known Googlebombs, also referred to as "link bombs" because they provide links to unrelated websites under the guise of answering the query.
For example, a Google search for French military victories had prompted a replica of a search engine page and the question "Did you mean military defeats?" as though the searcher's original quest was in vain.
Searches for "failure," "fiasco," and "miserable" in various languages resulted in links to various countries' current or former leaders.
A search in Danish for "primitive troll" provided a link to an official page for that nation's prime minister, while the query "mouton insignificant" (unimportant sheep) led searchers to a biography for the premier of Quebec, Canada.
"Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us," Moulton and Carattini explained in their blog.
"But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true."
Rather than deactivating Googlebombs by hand, Google engineers developed a search algorithm to neutralize them.
"Computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in many different languages," Moulton and Carattini wrote.
"That's what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages."
Google ranks search results based on a mathematical model that factors in key words and popularity of websites.
While Google has known about link bombs for years, it had previously expressed reluctance to defuse them individually because it didn't want to tinker with the objectivity of its Internet search model.
Google cautioned that some link bombs will slip past the algorithm net, which will be tightened based on feedback from searchers.
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Somebody mooching off your wireless internet connection? Either lock it down or do what this guy did: mess with their internets! Using iptables he redirected traffic, flipped images upside down, and even set their webpages to display blurry. It's pretty freaking genius, but I still prefer my way of handling wi-fi thieves: hunting them down and cutting off their heads.
Inventor of bear suit makes real life Halo suit
The inventer of a bear-protection suit has created a much slimmer version which has been designed to stave off bullets, explosives, knives, and clubs. The suit is called Trojan and the inventer describes it as the "first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour" and he hopes to get it deployed for Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and US soldiers in Iraq. The suit has stood up to an elephant gun, and is made from high-impact plastic lined with ceramic bullet protection over ballistic foam. Included in the suit are compartments for emergency morphine and salt, a knife and emergency light. Built into the forearms are a small recording device, a pepper-spray gun and a detachable transponder that can be swallowed in case of trouble. The whole suit comes in at 18 kilograms and overs everything but the fingertips and the major joints, and could allegedly be mass-produced for about $2,000. Plus, if you saw an army of these things coming at you you wouldn't even fight. You'd just give up and pray the space robots haven't come to anally probe you.
Totally hilarious!
Stephen Colbert comments on Apple and the new iPhone!
Stephen Colbert comments on Apple and the new iPhone!
