NY Times files a scattershot report on liberal blogs 'Google bombing' GOP candidates for the upcoming elections. Reporter Tom Zeller Jr. does piss poor job explaining to readers what Google bombing is and why liberal blog myDD.com (my Direct Democracy) is guilty of gaming the search engine's algorythm.

Fifty or so other Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated "Google bombing" campaign intended to game the search engine's ranking algorithm.

How sophisticated is this attempt to link searches of GOP candidates to negative news articles?

Each name is associated with one article. Those articles are embedded in hyperlinks that are now being distributed widely among the left-leaning blogosphere. In an entry at MyDD.com this week, Mr. Bowers said: "When you discuss any of these races in the future, please, use the same embedded hyperlink when reprinting the Republican's name. Then, I suppose, we will see what happens."

Did you get all that? Very sophisticated work indeed. More after the jump.

The highlight of the confused article is rehashing everyone's favorite 6-year-old email forward.

The ability to manipulate the search engine's results has been demonstrated in the past. Searching for "miserable failure," for example, produces the official Web site of President Bush.

Even my grandmother sent that one to me. Every time one of these articles makes mainstream media (go ahead google 'French Military Victories" for old time's sake) Google PR issues the canned response.

"A site's ranking in Google's search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query."

A New Campaign Tactic [NYT Times]