This is the information age and a major war over public opinion is being waged. It seems apparent that a major casualty of this war came in 1999 when the first ever Google-bomb resulted in the first major casualty of this war... the truth.

You may remember reading a few months back how some democrats, working with liberal bloggers, were able to make the Google search, 'miserable failure' lead to the White House biography of George W. Bush. As a Bush supporter, I can agree with the left: that was pretty funny?. But what are the long term implications of Google Bombing?

Google downplays this problem, saying

We're only seeing it with obscure queries where there's really not that much action on the Web about them,' said Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology. 'I don't think it's possible to do this sort of thing on queries with well-defined results like ' I.B.M.' So given that it only affects one query out of the more than 200 million a day we handle, it's hard to see it becoming much of a problem.

I cannot agree. This seems to be a major problem. In terms of current events and searching for news stories, you can only find websites that agree with and or google-link sites to the query you are searching for. This allows for organized disinformation campaigns; it is going on even as we speak. Type in 'jew' into a google search engine. Instead of the top site discussing this great religeon and culture, or even sites discussing the terrible tragedy that was the Holocaust, the first result, Jew Watch, is a disguesting, hatefilled, site whose first place ranking undoubtedly was the result of Google Bombing by extremists who amount to nothing more than cyber terrorists in the war over public opinion. Google should be ashamed of a system that allows such rubbsih to become the number one link.

It seems like the end result of all of this is that the truth is doomed to become hopelessly obscured by special interests trying to spin the results of the most popular search engine in the world to favor their point of view. Perhaps the scariest reality in all of this is that America's youth are growing up on the web and becoming entirely dependent on search engines as a source of news and sources for their research papers. The young and impressionable likely do not have the skills required to wade through all of the lies to find the truth. Then again, they aren't much better off reading the garbage printed in the NYT. Its a sad, sad world.

Let it be noted, though, that I am trying to start my very own Google-Bomb campaign amongst conservative bloggers in retaliation for the whole miserable failure thing. You can participate by putting this link waffles up on your own blogsite.

UPDATE - CHECK THIS OUT