Democrats set to GoogleBomb 2006 Election

WebPronews.com reports that Democratic supporters have made plans to GoogleBomb Republicans in the run-up to the 2006 elections. Targets in Virginia include George Allen, Thelma Drake, and Frank Wolf.

Chris Bowers of My Direct Democracy announced plans on his web page on October 22, with a Daily Kos cross post that has already drawn over 350 responses.

Why do this? As described in the DailyKos postings:

"The idea is to associate a particular term (in this case, a candidate's name) with a particular webpage (in this case, a news article with unfavorable facts about the candidate) and increase the web traffic linking the term and the page so that the web page turns up in the top-ranked results whenever the term is Googled."

A fuller description of the process can be found here and
here. For a discussion of the "miserable failure" GoogleBombs in the 2004 presidential campaigns go here.

The logic behind this effort is that many voters will go web searching in the last days of a campaign to get information on candidates. Bowers' idea is to create Google Bombs that link these candidates with the worst articles abotu them from non-partisan sources.

It will be interesting to see what happens. Of course, this seems to be another example of a practice that if done by the GOP is is linked to voter supression or misinformation, but if done by Democrats it is considered clever.