Written By Kate Zimmermann | October 27, 2006 | Share This |

Recently, the New York Times and NPR ran stories about a Google Bombing campaign launched by liberal bloggers against a group of Republican senators. By coordinating a series of links to the same set of negative stories about the senators, the bloggers were able to increase their rank in search results.

These attacks come on the heels of a flurry of political activity from Google. Google Earth launched a political map mashup, Eric Schmidt shared a vision for a future search engine that could tell us when politicians were lying, and NetPAC (Google’s political action committee) gave out its first endorsements for Democratic senators. Google’s entry into politics has some analysts raising eyebrows about the supposed objectivity of their search engine. If search plays a role in the public’s perception of the “truth”, how closely search should be aligned with politics, and what are their motivations for this alignment?

Google has said that they will get more involved in politics, citing their “civic duty”. As the indexor of the world’s information, I partially agree that it’s their responsibility to promote awareness of public issues. But, for a company whose tag line is “dont be evil”, promoting a political agenda questions the objectivity of their engine, and comes a bit too close to the evil side of Big Business. Should we start considering Google in the same vein as oil companies? Tobacco lobbyists? Their image, says CNN, “is on the cusp of a tipping point. Previously, they could do no wrong but the honeymoon with the public is over and they might have to be careful…” By encouraging politicians to become more involved in search, eg: the google bombing campaign, many say that Google is compromising its image and its results.

So, Google + Politics, good or bad? From a search marketing perspective, we say, it’s terrific! bring it on! In fact, let me put you directly in contact with our sales department… Look, we’re in the business of search, so the fact that politicians are finally getting more involved is nothing but good news for us. But, there’s more to it than the financial motivation - honestly, i think politics and search just makes sense together. They have similar goals and similar applications, and I’m suprised that politicians have not, until now, been more involved in SEO and SEM.

Search gives politicians a window of access to the public conversation. It puts them in touch with voters that they might not reach through conventional means. As SiliconValley.com writes, “[Search] can help a campaign find potential supporters even if they’re hidden in opposition territory.” Likewise, search helps interested citizens find the campaign. Just as the primary goal of a campaign is public outreach, the primary value of SEO and SEM is public visibility.

For efficiencies sake, “grass roots” marketing no longer means travelling door to door to generate support - it means reaching out to individuals in niche communities, which are no longer defined strictly by geographic location. People gather information and communicate via the internet, so traditional campaign techniques - the stump tours, hand-shaking, distributing flyers, and cold-calling are far less effective than search at reaching the mainstream audience. Think about the last time you physically cut out a newspaper article to give to a friend, as opposed to just emailing her the story (or in my case - blogging about it). In the past two years with the explosion of social media, political conversations are taking place almost exclusively online. Promoting politics through search is not only more efficient, its more effective.

Finally, both search and politics succeed by translating information from an individual to a macro-scopic level, and back again. Politicians, in theory, formulate party platforms based on the opinions of their constituents, and then re-destribute those opinions to generate support from other individual voters. Small picture makes the big picture, big picture influences the small picture. Likewise, search connects indivudual users to individual pages by generalizing user intent. Small to big to small. Especially with the maturation of local search (excellent example being Google’s political map mashup) politicians can leverage the Internet to attract multiple niche communities with a consolidated campaign.

Okay, we all agree, search is good for politics. But will politics compromise search? Believe me, Google isn’t stupid to the keyword-stuffing, link-baiting campaigns of liberal bloggers. If their SEO tactics are honestly spam, they’ll get kicked out of the index in one hot second. Furthermore, Google is continuously altering its index to avoid anything even suspiciously non-relevant. The fact that the democratic bloggers have built a search campaign that smartly coordinates site optimization, networking and paid advertising to maximize visibility doesn’t mean that Google is liberally biased. Two years ago, Democrats arguably lost the presidential election for ignoring how the internet changed public perception, so I’m at the very least impressed that they’ve been quick to learn from their mistakes. And, while I admit that i’m a bit worried about the potential loss of trust people may invest in Google as a provider of information, perhaps that’s a good thing. Greater transparency of SEO tactics will make people more aware of how search results can be manipulated, and why the Internet is not an informant of “truth” but merely a record of public perception.

Topics: Google, SEM: Paid Search, Search: News |