User talk:Brockert/sig

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[edit] Googlebombing with a signature template

At 04:37, Jan 22, 2005, I edited my signature template to include [[Image:George W. Bush.jpeg|2px|brain damaged chimp]], which renders as a bullet between the link to my user page and talk page, like this:

—Ben Brockert Image:George W. Bush.jpeg (RE: be CRT knob)

which renders as

&#8212;<a href="/wiki/User:Brockert" title= "User:Brockert">Ben Brockert</a> <a href="/wiki/Image:George_W._Bush.jpeg" class="image" title="brain damaged chimp"><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0c/2px-George_W._Bush.jpeg" alt="brain damaged chimp" longdesc="/wiki/Image:George_W._Bush.jpeg" /></a> <a href="/wiki/User_talk:Brockert" title="User talk:Brockert">(RE: be CRT knob)</a>

I chose brain damaged chimp specifically because it had relatively few hits on google (less than 10,000). I then monitored the Google standings of the search term whenever I remembered to, to evaluate if user signatures could be used for effective Google bombing. I was also trying to evaluate the function of Google. Ideally, Image:George W. Bush.jpeg would have shown up under the Google image search.

[edit] Results

On Google:

With quotes,

[edit] Conclusions

This type of tampering with Wikipedia and Google is both effective and difficult to detect. The signature was in place, unchanged, for four months, and I did not receive one comment on it. Either no one noticed it, or no one cared. Doing this in a normal signature would have failed quickly, because every person who edited a page with the signature would have seen the full text. Signature templates allow a level of secrecy about the signature that is not always in Wikipedia's best interest. The signature was used on at least 197 pages, and appeared many more times than that due to multiple signatures on a single talk page.

That user signatures only show up on talk pages is one drawback of this approach. If a person found a common article template that wasn't closely watched, and inserted some hidden text or hid an image, they might be more successful. I do not know if any templates are unwatched to that degree, but sometimes even the most brazen vandalism goes unchecked for a surprising length of time. For a google bombing to be successful, the alteration only has to persist long enough for the site to be re-indexed, which is likely a short interval for such a popular site. That Wikipedia is then mirrored by a number of leeches only strengthens the durability of such an approach.

Google image search apparently does not use the alt text of links to include them in the search, so it never did show up there. If it was possible to use the img tag on Wikipedia, I am confident that it could have been accomplished by using the text <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/George_W._Bush.jpeg" alt="brain damaged chimp" height="3" width="2">. That it isn't possible to do that on en: is a good thing.

[edit] Comments

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