A Change Is Gonna Come

Bloggers “Google bomb” veiled hate site

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2007

You may very well know the drill. Key in the search term “Martin Luther King” on Google, and among the top hits retrieved by the search engine is martinlutherking[dot]org. At first glance, it seems like a neutral—albeit very basic—informational site, but clicking on a few articles will unmask the hate. Referencing the civil rights leader as a “corrupt Communist under the control of a Marxist Jewish conspiracy,” the site—owned by Don Black, Webmaster of the white supremacist site stormfront[dot]org and a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—has been become a well-known lesson in discerning the provenance of Internet resources.

Black’s site has, for some time, been the top result in its search category—and the linking by educators may be partly to blame. So educational bloggers and others have joined a “Google bombing” campaign to post links to legitimate King sites in order to push Black’s site down in the search results. “[The method] should really have another name because what we’re trying to do is just push credible sites up,” says Tom Hoffman, manager of School Tool, an open-source educational product, who promoted the effort on his blog, Tuttle SVC.

Critics, however, have accused the campaign itself of censorship. Despite the problematic nature of Black’s Web site, they contend, no one has the right to remove a Web listing. “One person said it was like pulling the card in the catalog,” says Jill Walker, an associate professor who teaches new media studies at the University of Bergen in Norway and author of the blog jilltxt.net. She has urged her readers to de-link the site since August. “I can see that point of view. But I actually believe it’s more like correcting the card catalog.”

While many educators use the site to teach students that results on the Web aren’t always what they seem, Hoffman laments the fact that in so doing they unwittingly support the hate site. “The MacArthur Foundation [by linking to the site] was essentially casting its vote for it,” says Hoffman, who created the alternative Web page notmartinlutherking.org. “Google thinks the MacArthur Foundation is a credible source so it gives the site a tiny boost in the rank.”

Besides e-mailing schools and libraries around the world and asking them to remove the link, Hoffman has also offered up a quick fix. By attaching a short piece of code at the end of the link, users may continue to post the source, without contributing to its Google ranking. The actual code, which can be pasted into a blog or educational site, looks like this: <a href="http://martinlutherking.org" rel="nofollow"> Martin Luther King</a>.

As the campaign has caught on, some bloggers are stunned that educators didn’t realize that they were lending credibility to the controversial site by posting the URL. “I’m constantly surprised that it shocks people,” says Will Richardson, educator and author of the blog Weblogged. “There seem to be a lot of educators who don’t understand the complexity of what’s going on out there.”

But perhaps they’re catching on. A recent Google search for the civil rights leader did retrieve the martinlutherking [dot]org site—but as the fifth result. “We couldn’t push it off the front page,” says Hoffman. “But it’s gone down, which is probably a realistic expectation.”