The WMD page has been around for a while. The reason it comes up when you tell Google you feel lucky is that Google ranks pages based on how many links those pages have to them. Many webloggers have been linking to the WMD error page, driving up its page rank and placing it at the top of the list for that search term. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button just takes you directly to the top page in the results list.
This practice if done deliberately is known as "Googlewashing" and there is an interesting article on it here : http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html That article is about how many people suspected that webloggers Googlewashed the term "second superpower" to change its meaning from the original as it appeared in a February article referring to the massive civil society protests of the war in Iraq. If you search Google for "the second superpower" now you find the search results heavily skewed towards an essay that starts out talking about the civilian protests but them redefines the term to refer to communications technologies such as weblogs and the Internet in general. It makes for an interesting peek into the wacky world of self-organization and the definition of memes. Chris --- CHRIS CORRIGAN Bowen Island, BC, Canada http://www.chriscorrigan.com [email protected] (604) 947-9236 > -----Original Message----- > From: OSLIST [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Artur > Ferreira da Silva > Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2003 7:32 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Google's WMD Error Message > > Hi Linda and Florian: > > At 08:05 07-07-2003 +0800, Linda E. Laddin wrote: > >Dear All, > >The folks at Google seem to be amusing themselves and us with this > >parody of an error message, so it may be there for a while. Be sure to > >click on Detect Weapons and Bomb for extra fun! Cheers, > > I am not sure. I made searchs with the "I am lucky" option for "learning > organizations", "open Space" (try this one) and "open space technology" > and > found the results I would expect. > > On the other hand, this weekend took place an hackers context where > hackers > would gain points for changing the contents of known sites. > > We will see in the next few days... > > * > * > ========================================================== > [email protected] > ------------------------------ > To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, > view the archives of [email protected], > Visit: > > http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
