Rad Geek People's Daily

We did it before, and we can do it again.

While doing a bit of Googling for a citation of the decision in Roe v. Wade, I was reminded of a rather unpleasant fact: anti-abortion nuts have, up to this point, done a pretty good job at getting their agitprop ranked above factual information about Roe v. Wade and abortion in web searches. (On a related topic, see Crisis Pregnancy Centers Move Online.) As of 1 February 2005, the top search result for “Roe v. Wade” on Google (the one you’ll get from “I Feel Lucky”) is not the text of the case; it’s an anti-choice advocacy site called RoevWade-dot-org (I won’t link it here, lest it throw off the Google Bombing) — a one-stop shop for anti-abortion myths such as Post-Abortion Syndrome, the abortion-breast cancer link, and more, along with a heaping helping of wit and wisdom from everyone from Feminists for Life to Dr. James Dobson. You can find similar wingnut sites at the top of many other abortion-related Google searches.

Therefore, I propose that we do something about it. Specifically, I suggest we start throwing bombs.

Google Bombs.

Here is how you do it:

1. Go to your webpage, weblog, LiveJournal, or anything else that Google can see. If you don’t have one, get one. Just sprinkle it with a bit of personal information (or put up that huge site you?@ef;bf;½ve always dreamed of), and remember to add the Google bombing code somewhere on your page (see below).

2. Somewhere in the HTML on your site, include the following snippet. You can either include it in the HTML of updates themselves, or in the linkroll, or (best of all) both:

   <a href="http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Roe/" title="Touro Law Center: Roe v. Wade (1973-01-22)">Roe v. Wade</a>

   And while you’re at it, add the following snippet too, to help women who are considering abortion find useful information on where to go, instead of political harangues and anti-abortion deception:

   <a href="http://www.gynpages.com/" title="GynPages.com: Abortion Clinics Online">abortion</a>

   If you want a quick-and-dirty cut-and-paste that you can add to your web page without the trouble of editing, here you go:

   <p>Anti-abortion ideologues beware: I'm promoting objective, factual information on:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Roe/" title="Touro Law Center: Roe v. Wade (1973-01-22)">Roe v. Wade</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gynpages.com/" title="GynPages.com: Abortion Clinics Online">abortion</a></li>
</ul>
<p>You can too. Join me in <a href="http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/02/01/bombing_for">Bombing for Choice</a>.</p>

   The more pages on your site you include these snippets on, and the more frequently you update your site while the HTML snippet is present on it, the better the results.

3. If you want to be extra helpful, you can help spread the idea further: provide a link back to this page to explain what you’re doing, or provide your own explanation of what the GoogleBomb is and how people can get involved.

4. Add your site to Google, if you haven’t already.

And from there, watch the magic of precision GoogleBombing do its work!

Once you’ve joined in the bombing campaign, let me know about it (by e-mail or by TrackBack), and I’ll be glad to give you a shout-out in a later update on the campaign.

Bombs away!

P.S. This is not a meme. Please don’t call it one. Thank you.

Update 2005-02-02: I made a mistake in the cut-and-paste option below: I accidentally used a relative URI when I should have used an absolute one; this means that if you cut-and-pasted from this page before this notice went up you’ll have a broken link. You can fix it by getting the new cut-and-paste below and replacing the old one with it.