[Reader-list] the 404 error story

[Ravi Sundaram]

The war on the web
Anthony Cox describes how his spoof error page turned into a 'Google bomb' 
for weapons of mass destruction
Anthony Cox
Wednesday July 09 2003
The Guardian

I had always wondered how those viral emails or amusing web page addresses 
forwarded to me built up such momentum. Little did I know that I would be 
responsible for one of the most successful internet memes this year, and be 
accused of developing a so-called "Google bomb" of mass destruction.

In early February, I was reading online a Guardian article about Hans 
Blix's problems obtaining cooperation in Iraq. Immediately after, I was 
confronted with the ubiquitous 404 error page, which usually tells the 
reader that a website is unavailable. With this serendipitous inspiration 
in mind, along with a text editor and some fiddling in a graphics package, 
I created a spoof 404 "weapons of mass destruction" error page. Saddam 
would have been proud; the page was deployed and operational well within 45 
minutes.

After favourable comments from friends, I posted it in the newsgroup 
uk.rec.humour. Within the next 24 hours, the website had had 150,000 hits 
and had propagated to 118 newsgroups. By the end of February, it had 
received more than one million page impressions. Perhaps the ultimate 
accolade was having the original email come back to me with a note saying: 
"Have you seen this?" Visits declined throughout the subsequent war, and I 
suspected its 15MB of fame had passed.

Yet, suddenly, in the first four days of July I received nearly 4m page 
impressions, more than the previous five months combined. The reason? 
Typing "weapons of mass destruction" in Google and hitting the "I'm feeling 
lucky" button did not bring up Number 10's "dodgy dossier", but my spoof 
site. Suddenly, it was a lot funnier and accessible: even Google couldn't 
find the WMD.

The first Google bomb was created by Adam Mathes in 2001. He exploited 
Google's page ranking system to return a friend's website when the words 
"talentless hack" were used as a search term. He used a multitude of pages 
linking to his friend's site, with the specific term "talentless hack". 
Even though his friend's site did not contain the search term itself, after 
calling upon others to insert such links into their sites, the Google bomb 
found its target.

Google's page ranking treats links as votes for a website, and both the 
number and the importance of the link helps increase the ranking of a site. 
My site had steadily increased its ranking, including a link from the 
Channel 4 news website and the Guardian, but perhaps the majority were from 
personal pages, discussion boards and blogs.

However, this was not a deliberate attempt to use Google to make a 
political point. This Google bomb was slowly and unknowingly built, and 
only by chance coincided with the accusations that intelligence documents 
had been "sexed up".

Last Friday, bloggers really picked up on it and it was the highest linked 
to page in weblogs according to Daypop.com. On Monday, however, a search 
for "weapons of mass destruction" sent you to a White House strategy 
document, which might be seen as a step forward for Google users and 
perhaps the White House.
Then on Tuesday my page was back at the top, so it may have been a glitch 
at Google, rather than a deliberate decision to drop the site.

This is a problem for Google: weblogs have been accused of causing "noise" 
in their searches. Instead of providing good original source material, 
reams of musings from bloggers are returned. The success of my WMD page 
underlines a problem Google needs to address. Sure it's funny, but if you 
wanted documents on WMD, is that what you really expect from a search engine?

I have received about 200 emails from such diverse sources as United 
Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and serving 
soldiers in the Gulf. Even those critical of the perceived anti-war message 
thought it was funny. One of the more offensive messages called me a 
cowardly little boy and stated: "I am grateful to the almighty that not all 
Englishmen are slithering bottom-feeders."

Ironically, I was not against the war, my views on the war being similar to 
those of journalist David Aaronovitch and MP Ann Clwyd. But if you are 
going to make a topical joke, then Bush is an obvious and easy target.
· Anthony Cox is a pharmacist at the West Midlands Adverse Drug 
Reaction Monitoring Centre and a teaching fellow at Aston University. He 
also writes a blog on drug safety at www.blacktriangle.org

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