Google plays politics

25/02/2008

Google attempted to conquer a new niche market this month - one that only appears every four years. They opened a 25-person sales office in Washington DC dedicated to political campaigning via its Adwords system on Google.com and its content network.

According to the Guardian, major presidential hopefuls - from McCain, Guiliani and Huckabee on the right, to Clinton, Edwards and Obama on the left - have signed up.

While no new search optimisation techniques will be available, Peter Greenberger, Google's Head of Elections and Issue Advocacy explains how they might use geo-targeting for their clients. "You can geo-target as finely as a zip code, so almost to within a mile or so radius of where the voter is. If you want to reach a voter in New Hampshire it means you're not wasting media spend on users in Vermont who can't vote."

Google allows political adverts from candidates regardless of their views. However this does come with the caveat that copy must still comply with Google's editorial guidelines. Discrimination rules mean extreme political copy is unlikely to be accepted, as are misleading adverts which appear on behalf of candidates other than who they appear to represent. Any text relating to a candidate's personal life is also strictly off-limits.

In the natural search results, political influence on certain search terms has been successful via a method of spam known as 'Google bombing'. This is where many domains coordinate the anchor text linking to a single webpage, and has led to mainstream media coverage of some of its more notable results. A search for "miserable failure" found George Bush's autobiography, "waffle" led to John Kerry's official site, and in the UK, "liar" delivered Tony Blair's page on the Downing Street website. Google has addressed this by adjusting its algorithm and so far it seems to be working.

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