Skip to primary content

Bomb | May 03 2002

Once upon a time there was a nice lady named Leslie who had a website called hoopla.com which all the child loved because Leslie was a gifted writer with serious design chops. Then one day Leslie’s website was stolen from her by some bad people, no doubt because of the negligence of a company called Verisign which is the keeper of domain names and has a long history of fucking people over, largely, one imagines, because they wield absolute power in these matters and absolute power corrupts. (Actually, the truth is probably more pedestrian than that. Probably they’re just regular people like you and me, doing regular jobs like you and me, it’s just that their jobs happen to require them to ask people like Leslie to cut their thumbs off with butter knives.)

Now, does everyone know what a google bomb is? A google bomb is a method for exploiting a loophole in Google’s page ranking algorithm so that a particular web page appears at the top of Google rankings whenever a certain word or phrase is searched on. The first Google bomb was launched last year by Adam Mathes in a piece written for uber.nu. Adam asked his readers to link to his friend Andy Pressman’s site using the phrase “talentless hack.” Enough readers played along that Andy Pressman’s site soon became the #1 search result for “talentless hack.” A few months later Dean Allen, who is anything but a talentless hack, asked his readers to link to a certain page on his site using the phrase “fuck me.” That page is still the #1 search result for “fuck me.” (Go ahead, try it.)

Today Dean asked the world to link to a piece on his site describing Leslie’s plight. The phrase used to link? Verisign. Very soon, after all the angry children have added that link to their sites (preferably on the home page), the #1 search result for Verisign will be Dean’s piece.

Will this help Leslie get her website back? Will it help save her thumbs? I don’t know, but it certainly couldn’t make things any worse.

A special bonus joke, comprehensible only to Oblivio readers:

What did Andy Pressman’s lover say to him as Andy got into bed?

Fuck me like Verisign, you talentless hack.