News - Search Engines

Most people are familiar with Google's standard logo and generally consider it a staple of their daily search routine. Google has in the past, replaced this logo with festive logos on Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Halloween and other US holidays. However, this change used to be simply a change of the logo itself. Over the past few months, this change has included a search result when clicked, sending the user into Google's search results with the top results for the term associated with the logo displayed. Most domainers and webmasters are familiar with this, and perhaps have even attempted to get a piece of the search traffic.

I have noticed that on Wikipedia, if the entry is highly-ranked for that result, it will receive what we call "ip vandalism" which is essentially users not logged in adding their links to the entry for some spillover traffic and revenue. We then request an IP lock on the page and this vandalism stops for the day. However, lately I have noticed a much more disturbing trend.

Bloggers with backends into news organizations have begun taking advantage of this result simply to generate traffic to their site. Since Google automatically shows news results first in a relevant search, any news website that posts about Google's logo is instantly awarded with about one million clicks. This is very enticing and we can see that this trend is creating its own type of unedited blogger.

For instance, last week Google's logo displayed a UFO as a logo with "unexplained phenomenon" as the search click. Harold Nolte at The Examiner clearly got very excited about this and posted "Google logo: is it an unexplained phenomenon?", which instantly drove millions of clicks, and hundreds of snide remarks, to the Examiner. Today, the new logo is also a UFO, over a field, with the search term set as "crop circles". Wikipedia is again the first result but above that we have various news articles. Early this morning, it was a ZDnet community article which has since been purged from ZD which pulled it off the front page in due time. But we still have 18 other articles, proving that everyone has realized that this show-stopper act is worth getting in on.

Who doesn't want a million clicks in one day? But clearly journalism is sinking to a new low - most notably by its lack of good editors. The only thing that is certain is this miniature explosion of fake search result articles at newsrooms is that it is going to explode in popularity and competition.