'Abortion' Second Result In Google Search For 'Murder'

Type in a Google search for the word "murder," and a link to a Wikipedia entry for "abortion" is the second search result that appears.

Boing Boing, which first observed the results, noted that Googlebombers have "spoofed Google," adding, "However you feel about abortion, this Wikipedia page is pretty clearly not the second-most relevant document regarding murder on the entire English-speaking World Wide Web."

Googlebombing, as Geekosystem explains, is "the practice of gaming Google search results by systematically coordinating links from a number of sites to a given webpage to bump up its ranking within a given Google search."

Previous instances of Googlebombing have included causing a biography of George W. Bush to appear under the results for searches for "miserable failure" or searches for "liar" to return results linking to Tony Blair.

Google wrote of Googlebombs in 2007, "Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs."

See below:

Comments

[mustardhead98]

09:04 PM on 04/03/2011

Duh...abortion is the kil ling of a baby. It IS mur der. How u all can say it isn't shows a true disconnect....

[endearingnoises]

08:24 PM on 02/27/2011

The "National Hot Dog and Sausage Council" website (www.hot-dog.org) is the second google result when searching for hot dog.

[JuergenHartl]

06:41 PM on 02/27/2011

The first three pages did not return anything mentioning abortion.

[LMPE]

02:24 PM on 02/27/2011

Google's founders can't control what people associate with a given topic. A recent HP article noted that a Google search for Martin Luther King brings up a webpage dedicated to smearing Dr. King's legacy.

[SuperBenFranklin]

11:43 AM on 02/27/2011

When google can be fooled this easy, google is broken.

[Quinxy von Besiex]

03:57 PM on 02/25/2011

I learned a few surprising things about abortion the other day... It's a bit tangential to the topic, but interesting nonetheless. This is not said with any agenda, pro- or anti-. They were just surprising to me.

Over 33% of all women will have a medically conducted abortion in their lifetime. About 30-50% of the time an egg is fertilized it fails to adhere to the uterine wall, and the woman never knows she technically conceived. About 10-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriages. And, the average American woman has 2.03 children. Taking these figures together this means that the average woman who produces 2.03 children was actually pregnant (or if you prefer had eggs fertilized) 2.39 times and experiences 2.01 undesired abortions (miscarriages and failures of a fertilized egg to attach) and 0.33 elected abortions.

One observation I'd make is that those who believe that life begins at conception and that a fertilized egg is equivalent morally/spiritually to a baby might want to invest more effort and money promoting research to reduce undesired abortions since they represent a 6.1 times greater loss of life (in their view); that might prove a tractable problem unhindered by politics. And while I understand that these undesired abortions might be viewed as "acts of God", God presumably would expect us to fight those deaths in the same way we are expected to fight against malaria, polio, etc.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

[think-it-over]

02:13 AM on 02/26/2011

Do you know what you've actually claimed?

"... the average woman who produces 2.03 children was actually pregnant (or if you prefer had eggs fertilized­) 2.39 times and experience­s 2.01 undesired abortions (miscarria­ges...) and 0.33 elected abortions."

2.39 actual pregnancies - 2.01 "undesired abortions" - 0.33 "elected abortions" = 0.05 full term pregnancies. You've claimed that the average woman gets pregnant 2.39 times, finishes .05 pregnancies, yet produces 2.03 children. IOW, you've suggested that the average full term pregnancy results in 40.6 children.

Let's try some better numbers. 100 "average" women will deliver 203 children, roughly 12 of which are twins, so 100 women will complete 191 pregnancies. 33 of them will have one or more abortions. A few may have more than one, so let's say 39 (accounting for 40 fetuses). That means 100 women will have 230 pregnancies, resulting in 203 children. 39 abortions divided among 230 pregnancies is a 16.9% rate. Reliable reports put the actual rate at 20%, so either the reports, your numbers, or my 3% rate for twins is slightly off.

I don't see any point in accounting for fertilized eggs that never implant, since they fail a reasonable definition of pregnancy. Perhaps those who think all fertilized embryos are "unborn children" may see it differently, and think those eggs should be recovered, raised in test tubes and accounted for in statistics.

[Quinxy von Besiex]

06:02 PM on 02/26/2011

You are correct that I neglected to consider twins, and I did confuse things by neglecting to properly describe one of the numbers. So, let me explain/correct. The 2.03 is the average number of births for an American woman. Adjusting for twins we'd have... a woman having an average number of 1.97 successful pregnancies (2.03 * 0.968). Sadly, a miscarriage rate of 15% (where the woman knows she miscarried) (http://www.babycenter.com/0_understanding-miscarriage_252.bc) means she knew she was pregnant 2.3 times (1.97 / 0.85). An embryo fails to implant itself about 40% of the time (have the quote from the source, can't find the source), which means that if she knew she was pregnant 2.3 times, this actually represented 3.8 times when an embryo was created (2.3 / 0.6); ignoring twins from here on out, since we'd need to get into what kinds of twins they are and how that changes the failure one one embryo to implant and the success of the other; it won't change the math that much. The abortion number is separate since it isn't dependent on any others, we infer the pregnancy from the abortion. Low-balling that at 0.33 (1 in 3 women have abortions in their lifetime (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1843717,00.html) and low balling it as if they had only 1, and adding this to the numbers we already have...

[Quinxy von Besiex]

06:02 PM on 02/26/2011

Meaning that...

The average American woman creates at least 4.13 embryos (3.8 + 0.33) of which "acts of God" (or in rarer cases poor neonatal care) destroy 1.77 (3.8 - 2.03), and induced abortion destroys 0.33.

My point really was just as you say, if I believed that life begins at conception (as many do), at the moment the egg is fertilized, if that is the moment the soul enters this new life, then I would be shocked and horrified to discover that in the process of my having my 2.03 children I had in fact contributed to the demise of an almost equal number of other embryos. And I'd be pretty shocked to realize that some other woman who was committed to having no children, who used birth control religiously, and who may have a single elective abortion may have caused the destruction of fewer embryos than I did. (See my comments about it being "God's will".) I just think it's a very interesting point/observation, and I had no idea it existed.

[yoyodyne666]

05:29 AM on 02/26/2011

I hope that was not your argument for abortion. Misscarriage and abortion are two entirely diffetent things. Just as dying in your sleep or being shot in street are two completely different things.However prenatal care is important, unless you are planning on aborting then it is moot.

[Quinxy von Besiex]

04:33 PM on 02/26/2011

I'm certainly not personally equating miscarriage with elective or medically necessitated abortions. I was simply trying to say, if one argues that life begins at conception, at the moment the egg is fertilized with sperm, then the demise of an embryo (any embryo) for any reason would seem like something to fight against, and more focus would be placed on the larger loss of embryos. (Of course most embryos that don't become viable fail to do so because of serious chromosome problems, but to those who view serious birth defects as insufficient grounds for abortion this wouldn't seem like it should matter.) It just seems there is a hypocrisy or at least inconsistency with that position.

[heiko]

03:30 PM on 02/25/2011

I just closed my google acc't.

[guitar7masta]

02:30 PM on 02/25/2011

so what? apparently they don't know how google works. it looks for keywords and relevance. sometimes these things happen.

there are alot of people that make that analogy, so based on the relevance of the correlation between those two words, you get that result.

[archarabia]

02:30 PM on 02/25/2011

Maybe because the phrase "abortion is murder" is a phrase used a lot in the U.S.

[Aaron Peeples]

01:54 PM on 02/25/2011

Well, if Google says it, then it must be true!

[CHMB]

01:48 PM on 02/25/2011

The trolls sure are out today. I've had no less than 5 replies saying why should google change it.

*yawn*

[livelongandprosper]

01:40 PM on 02/25/2011

Who really cares. Google is a robot. Anyone who is influenced in their thinking based upon a search result is too impressionable and those who worry about it, too paraniod.

[Stilyagi]

01:32 PM on 02/25/2011

" So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs."

Really?? Well, it didn't work because I just checked, and abortion is indeed the second hit for "murder". How hard can this be to change, Mr. Google??

[BarryWolk]

01:26 PM on 02/25/2011

I just went to Google and it's true, writing 'murder' the second link that pops up is 'Abortion on Wikipedia'!! So, I counted four instances of the word 'murder' in the entire article and three of them were in reference to abortion doctors themselves being MURDERED!!

Google, this is NOT how we were led to believe that your site is set-up to work. Please fix this! Anyway, four references NEVER get you position # 2, Mr. Google!!

Have there been any shenanigans going on here?!? Your site's reputation is on the line, Google!

[pdxist]

01:22 PM on 02/25/2011

This isn't a Googlebomb. No campaign to Googlebomb this has ever been found. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the very common activist phrase "abortion is murder," which can be found all over the web, has influenced Google to believe the term abortion is related to murder. The fact that "murder" appears four times in the Wikipedia page doesn't help. Also, if you search for "murder" and then click on "abortion," you are validating to Google that "abortion" is a valid result for "murder," and Google will measure that and take that into account.