I typed in Hillaryclinton.com on AOL Search -- powered by Google -- and up pops Obama's web site ( See below) inviting me to;
"Help elect Barack Obama President of the United States"
It must be quite a surprise to people who are trying to support Hillary and give her money.
They don't want to help Obama, they want Hillary.
How could this happen? Simple.
Obama has smarter tech guys and more money. With sponsored links, the more you bid on key words or phrases, the higher they will pop up on search engines. Obama has more money to bid higher for Hillaryclinton.com than Hillary has. Or maybe some good supporters in Google or AOL.
This is not unusual in the dog-eat-dog world of search wars. If you type in British Airways, the first hit that often comes up is First Class Flyer, a nice travel newsletter, but not British Airways. When I type in United Airlines, I get Expedia, Orbitz and Cheapoair, before I got to the United site. Every search is difference. The same results don't come up all the time, but Obama pops up first on AOL more than not. It doesn't work in Google.
But wait wait!
Aren't politicians suppose to more ethical than crass commercial pandering. Isn't Obama's campaign for hope and honesty.... and not deceiving or ripping off other people?
How could ripping off Hillaryclinton.com --- outbidding her for her own name and redirecting them to Barackobama.com --- be anything less than completely straightforward?
What if somebody typed in Huffingtonpost.com and Mattdrudge.com came up instead.
Reminds me of the time when Dick Tuck --- the Democratic prankster --- dressed up as a railroad engineer in 1972 and waved Richard Nixon's train on in the middle of speech Nixon was delivering off the back. These tricks used to happen all the time.
But those days are over aren't they?
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The key difference in Obama's campaign vs. Clinton's is that he's leveraging technology that Hillary just didn't, at least in the beginning of her campaign. Now that she sees what type of difference its making in Obama's campaign she's using those methods more.
I'm an Obama supporter but I'm a bigger Democrat. I've not been happy with the way the campaign has been going for the Democrat's of late, but I won't let a poorly run campaign negate the work that the Clintons have done in the past either. This contest started with Clinton and Obama saying they differed in very few arenas. Now it seems they are trying very hard to make it seem like they are very different. Personality wise they are, politically, they differ very little.
I became a software engineer before there was such a thing as a PC, and have taught a great many people things from simple to very complex about computers. There is always more to learn.
I think your article is interesting, by the way. Brings up aspects of marketing and ethos. Reminds me of a course I took in 76 called, "Values, Technology, and Society". We got to explore such diverse topics as cable television, particle accelerators, and the programs they used at SRI for 'remote viewing'.
Anyway, as an Obama supporter, I really wonder if his campaign is getting his money's worth from this tactic. :-)
http://www.cafepress.com/sugarbelleshop/4226338
P.S. More disconcerting to me are the conveniently placed ads here on HuffPost..paid or not, via google or not. It seems a bit hypocritical in a supposed balanced and open forum for political/social discussion, albeit even one with blog posts by those speaking in favor of one candidate or the other! Because, by far, there is a glut of Barack Obama ads...Just saying what I'm seeing, peeps!
That didn't happen at all. He did a search for Hillaryclinton.com and couldn'tdistinguish between the ads and the search results.
if you put hillaryclinton.com in your search engine, that's exactly where you'll end up (unfortunately).
Are you frickin' kidding me? HE BOUGHT AN AD!
The headline here is very misleading and should be changed.
And YOU are implying HE is practicing dirty politics?
This headline stinks to high heaven.
Her Bosnia lie wasn't admitted, it was "sleep deprivation"? ! ? !
I guess it depens on what the meaning of "is" is.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gloria-feldt/obama-is-right-words-mat_b_94234.html
Don't you know that AOL is for grannies?
Obviously, If I am writing about Dick Tuck in 1972, I am not exactly a babe. What do you have against older people?
AOL isn't for grannies, it's for people who don't have any sense. You might think of this as a clever trick, but it will only going to fool voters in West Palm Beach, not the majority of people in this country.
that links Obama to searches for Hillary Clinton. Those sneaky rascals! What will they
think of next?
Have the glory days of 'Google Bombing' from the grand old '04 campaign so quickly
been forgotten? http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/technology/circuits/22goog.html
search to the Obama website just to make the Obama-Nation *look* mean & sneaky.
Hmmmmnmm? Will we ever know for sure. (Or maybe it was ROVE! Bwha ha ha ha!)
NYT - January 22, 2004
Engineering Google Results to Make a Point
By TOM McNICHOL
TIME was - say, two months ago - when typing the phrase "miserable failure" into the Google search box produced an unexpected result: the White House's official biography of President George W. Bush.
But now the president has a fight on his hands for the top ranking - from former President Jimmy Carter, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and the author-filmmaker Michael Moore.
The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through "Google bombing," or manipulating the Web's search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.
The perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link). The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site. ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/technology/circuits/22goog.html
This article refers to purchasing Google advertising based on keywords. These purchases are what fund Google and AOL searches.
to do than the other, trading off $$ for the relative frugality of hacking.