Honestly I am not sure how I feel about this yet. Chris Bowers from MYDD has announced a grass roots campaign to “Google bomb the election” What exactly is that?

What
The utilization of Google Adwords and simultaneous, widespread embedded hyperlinks in order to drive as many voters as possible toward the most damning, non-partisan article written on the Republican candidate in seventy key US Senate and House races. The campaign will run from Tuesday, October 24th until Tuesday, November 7th.

Why
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the number one way that voters use the Internet for political action is to search for information on candidates. During the final two weeks of the election, it is reasonable to expect that as many as twenty million voters will be searching for information on candidates online. During this key time, this project will help push the most negative article written by a non-partisan media source on all key Republican candidates to the forefront of any search for that candidate. The negative article will appear both high on all Google searches for the candidates, and as an advertisement that appears whenever anyone searches for that candidate. By giving this article two prominent locations on Google searches for the candidate, and because it will come from a non-partisan source, it will increase the likelihood that the article will be seen and trusted by those searching for information on the candidate.

See MYDD for the how.

One thing is certain the power of blogs in politics is growing.

Dan Riehl is repulsed:

You would think that if Liberal Dems stood for something, something acceptable to America, anyway, they would most want to direct potential voters to that in the last days before an election.

Instead they hide who they are and what they stand for because they know America will reject them if they make their positions known. There is nothing noble in the stealth campaigns Dems have been running, from Webb to Casey and others.

Outside the Beltway has a good point:

This will be an interesting test of the theory that search king Google’s leftist owners are using their market leading power to intentionally skew search results and news content. Given that this plan to game the system has been publically announced on a very prominent website (Google PageRank and is being widely publicized elsewhere, it should be a simple task for Google to not only thwart this plan but to ban the participants from their metrics.

How does Google feel about MYDD publicly announcing their plan to manipulate Googles search results?

They have to take a position on this publicly don’t they?

Sister Toldjah finds the effort childish.

Blue Crab Boulevard sees this as a sign of desperation:

By all means, please do follow this advice from the left. This will ensure defeat for the Democrats. Because a real ground game, instead of a self-delusional, self-important, self-aggrandizing stunt will win out over a Google-bomb. To the left, the electorate is something to be treated with contempt.

How very sad.

Hot Air wants to know what MYDD defines as non-partisan

How do you define “non-partisan” in this context? There are an awful lot of blogs, for instance, that don’t have paid connections to candidates and therefore don’t meet the usual definition of partisan but are in fact as partisan as can be. The Nation, for instance. Even The New Republic.

 

 

Update

John Hawkins at Right Wing News is taking this tactic seriously and is countering with a GOP Google bomb of his own. 

normally, I think Googlebombs are kind of dumb. One of the most famous Googlebombs involved making George Bush’s name come up under the words “miserable failure.” My reaction to that was, “Cute, but so what?”

However, believe it or not, in this case, a Googlebomb could actually have an impact. Think about it. Who would be doing a Google Search on a particular candidate in the final days of a campaign? Probably an independent voter who is trying to get more information about a candidate. And, if the first article he runs across is a brutal hit piece, well, that could be the information that helps him make up his mind.

Would it play out that way in every case? No, but in big districts, if there’s particularly damaging information out there, a Googlebomb could have the potential to sway hundreds of voters.

So, what’s to be done? Well, in my opinion, we should simply fight fire with fire. That’s why I put together a list of key races for Republican blogs to Googlebomb.

Google has to weigh in on this.  Is either political party going to support the Google bombing blog war?