Google bombing - a technique for boosting a site's popularity with the Google search engine - has hit the news, but could it hit Google's famed impartiality as well?

The highly-respected search engine was forced by the Church of Scientology to remove sites after xenu.net was ranked first after a search on 'scientology'.

What started out as an innocent enough prank has steamrollered into a full-on human rights debacle. The human rights issue has little to do with the original practice and more to do with the US Digitial Millennium Copyright Act.

But why should network managers care? It depends on two things; the importance businesses set on being found through search engines, and the use of them within enterprises.

Tony Lock, a senior analyst at Bloor Research, explained that some search engines allowed site promotion for commercial benefit, but warned if companies beef up their search appearance with inappropriate meta-tags, they could face legal threats and negative publicity.

"There are examples of companies that put the name of their rival in their meta-tags. This led to a flood of legal letters and the tags were removed before it came to court," he said.

Google is and was a breath of fresh air among search engines. It ranks sites by popularity rather than the amount of money paid by site owners. It's purity of function made it an excellent tool for finding the exact site you were looking for.

But this strength has made Google a target, according to David Woods, a research director at Ovum. "Google has moved the goalposts a bit," he said. "Part of the penalty of that has been that it is now attractive to people who want to get a higher ranking. It's just taken a while for people to work out how to attack it successfully."

Google bombing, can improve a site's ranking artificially. An IT

vendor - or any other business, for that matter - could make sure that key phrases would return its site at the top of the rankings. This can distort Google's key strength - impartiality.

By linking in the same way across many sites, it is possible to artificially boost the rankings of the target site when linked to certain keywords. The recent spat with the Church of Scientology and xenu.net is a good example of this.

Weblogs linked to xenu.net with the word "Scientology," which boosted the site's rankings in Google to the extent it ranked first in Google's search results, over and above sites owned by the Church.

"It is difficult to believe the Church of Scientology got such a large array of meta-tags, without a bit of politics or manipulation going on," commented Lock.

Google bombing has been treated as harmless fun over the past few weeks. But as the stakes get higher, things could well get uglier. Citing the DMCA, the Church of Scientology has already forced Google into delisting links to certain parts of xenu.net.

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