I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [109]
"There was an intent to send a signal," Urs confirmed. "Let's assume machines are plentiful—what could we do?" The three thousand machines were followed by ten thousand more, all allocated to improving search quality. Jeff, Sanjay, and Amit Singhal* focused all that computational power into an explosion of innovation that greatly improved Google's ability to return relevant results. One key to better results, according to Jeff, was "being much more careful about how we handled anchor text."
The more pages in an index, the more information there was about who linked to whom. And just as important to Google, the more information there was about what those links said. The wording of an actual hyperlink is the anchor text. Associating anchor text with the content of the page it pointed to turned out to be enormously helpful. For example, some links to the University of California at Berkeley contained its Spanish name or synonyms like "Cal" or "Bears." Sometimes, however, relying too heavily on anchor text caused problems.
"Some anchor text was good and some was not so good," Jeff explained. "The query 'cold lemon soufflé' used to bring up MapQuest's homepage." One website used that exact phrase in a link to MapQuest, and Google gave the association too much weight. Another example was "more evil than Satan." In 1999 that search brought up Microsoft's homepage.* Sergey instructed Cindy to tell reporters it was the result of an "anomaly caused by quantum fluctuations in web space," a nonsense phrase that was repeated verbatim in stories purporting to explain the glitch.
Sometimes deceptive link language was intentional. Webmasters realized they could affect the ranking of results for certain search terms by intentionally pointing to pages with very specific anchor text, a trick that came to be known as "Googlebombing." The Googlebomb that caused me the biggest headache was "dumb motherfucker." Around the time of the 2000 presidential election, conducting a search for what we euphemistically called "DMF" brought up an online store selling George Bush campaign merchandise. As the person responsible for customer service, I held up the umbrella as crap rained down on us from outraged supporters of the president. I got in touch with the Bush website people and explained that it was not an intentional slight by Google. Then I drafted a message saying the same thing for our customer service representatives to use as a reply to users. The best reply, though, came from someone already familiar with the issue.
A couple of months after the Supreme Court ended the 2000 election, Eric Schmidt invited his friend Al Gore to speak at Google about the campaign, the Internet, the environment, and whatever else Gore wanted to talk about.
Gore zipped into TGIF on one of our many electric scooters. "I just rode in from Washington," he said to approving laughs as he dismounted and took the microphone. "You may know me as the man who used to be 'the next president of the United States,'" he joked, garnering thunderous applause. When question time came, a Googler asked Gore if he was familiar with the Bush Googlebomb. He was.
"So what's your opinion about it?" came the follow-up question.
Gore paused and looked around a bit, as if checking for camera crews or reporters. There weren't any, though the room was packed with Googlers sitting in folding chairs and standing on cubicle desks to get a better look.
"Well," he said at last, with a completely neutral expression, "I do believe you might have discovered artificial intelligence."
Users would orchestrate many more Googlebombs in the years to come, from "French military victories," which led to a fake Google error page that read, "Your search—'French military victories'—did not match any documents. Did you mean French military defeats?" to "out of touch management," which, immediately before Google's IPO, directed users to the page on Google.com