(a historical look from around 2008)
A few days ago the Hackers Anonymous declared war on the Church of Scientology, and today the internet is in a buzz about an apparent Google bombing. If you don’t know what Google bombing is: it’s ganging up of many – mostly bloggers – to all link to a specific page with the same text. For example, a while ago a Google bomb was launched on George Bush’s bio page with the words “total failure,” but since then Google patched that hole, and Google bombs became at least difficult. For reaching a top ranking now Google required the words that link to the site to appear within that site. So as long as George’s bio page did not contain the words ‘total ‘and ‘failure,’ he would not be a total failure (my wording was intended.)
But today when you search for ‘dangerous cult’ the top result was the Scientology main site www.Scientology.org.
Search Engine Land was not sure if that really was a Google bomb as the Scientology front page does not – certainly – contain the word ‘cult’ even though it does contain the word ‘dangerous.’ Another fact that supported that doubt was, that only some three hundred sites could be found that pointed to the Scientology site with the text ‘dangerous cult.’
And here is where the real power of the internet comes in. When I did the search on Yahoo
linkdomain:scientology.org “dangerous cult”
I got over 1400 hits. In other words, since that article on Search Engine Land was written, which might have been a few hours before I read it, more than 1000 other people picked up this story and wrote/blogged about it. If it has not been a Google bomb so far, it was now. And I am certainly proud to participate by supplying a link to a dangerous cult as well.
I know the Cof$ from the inside but I have to admit that I just love this power of the ‘Don’t mess with us!’ There are just more and more sites like this about the Delphi Academy of Los Angeles as a recruiting base springing up that it can’t be stopped centrally. It’s guerrilla warfare the Cof$ is involved in now and history has shown that such a war can not be won.