Game of Thrones Season 8 has been a roller coaster ride so far. Fans and followers have been truly amazed by the recent turn of events and also the fate of some of the characters in the show. Some fans, however, are not really happy with the way the final season has gone so far, and thus, decided to avenge the Game of Thrones writers by using a potent digital tool, called Google Bombing.
How Game of Thrones writers were Google bombed
A Game of Thrones Reddit channel – by the name “/r/Freefolk” – Google bombed the creators of the show so that their names turns up on top when someone searches on Google with the words “bad writers.” The group describes itself as a spoiler-friendly place.
“Bad Writers. Upvote this post so it’s first result when you google ‘Bad writers’,” read a post on the Reddit thread. The post also includes an image of D.B. Weiss and David Benioff (Game of Thrones co-creators).
According to Business Insider, the Reddit group even succeeded in what they were doing. Not only the names of the Game of Thrones writers but their images also showed up when people searched for “bad writers” on the search engine.
Google bombing is a way to affect the ranking of a particular site or content, or to put it simply, it is a technique to make a specific search result appear for a specific search term on Google. In this technique, the posts that get substantial thumbs up climbs on Google’s top searches for some particular words.
Since the Reddit group titled the thread “bad writers” and also linked an image of the Game of Thrones writers, Google’s algorithm was able to “index” the page and show it anyone who searched for the same words. Moreover, with massive support from the Reddit group, the image of Weiss and Benioff automatically showed up on top when anyone searched with the words “bad writers.”
More Google bombs for GoT writers
Like the Reddit group “/r/Freefolk,” many other posts tried the same Google bombing trick by linking the image of the writers to the search terms “Dickheads” and “Dumb and Dumber.” However, none enjoyed the same level of success as the term “bad writers.”
Such anger toward the Game of Thrones writers is somewhat understandable, considering how connected fans are to the characters in this HBO series. Moreover, it is not just a few Reddit groups that are angry with the show, but fans on other social media platforms have also been expressing disappointment after watching the latest episode.
This so fkin true lol #GameofThrones pic.twitter.com/vwFUfxM86n
— abdallah (@countwithme) May 13, 2019
Do let us know in the comments section below if you agree with the Google bombing of the Game of Thrones writers.
Google bombing – nothing new
Google bombing is nothing new, and over the years, there have been numerous victims of this digital tool. The most recent victim was U.S. President Donald Trump, who was linked to the word “idiot.” This issue got so much attention that Google CEO Sundar Pichai had to explain the behind-the-screens process of how the search engine works.
Speaking in front of the House Judiciary Committee in December last year, Pichai said that the company never “manually intervenes” in search results, rather the results are based on things like “relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it.”
“We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword. We, as Google, have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of their pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals,” Pichai said at the time.
The first case of Google bombing reportedly occurred in 1999. At the time, search for the term “more evil than Satan himself” would return Microsoft’s website, notes a report from Fortune. Other popular instances include British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s biography with the search term “liar”, Bill O’Reilly’s homepage for the words “terrorist sympathizer” and many more.
Notably, TheDonald Reddit forum also used the same technique before the 2016 election by linking the word “rapist” with images of Bill Clinton. The forum also tried the same for CNN’s logo by connecting it to the search term “fake news.”
It must be noted that Google bombing campaigns work only as long as the members actively promote it. Once the members are done with it, Google’s algorithms automatically pull it down in the search results and start searching for pictures or websites more relevant for that search term.
