Bombing for Choice (posted 1 February 2005)
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.
Here is how you do it:
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�ve always dreamed of), and remember to add the Google bombing code somewhere on your page (see below).
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:
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:
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:
Anti-abortion ideologues beware: I'm promoting objective, factual information on:
- Roe v. Wade
- abortion
You can too. Join me in Bombing for Choice.
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.
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.
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.
your name replied:
In your code, I think the “Join me in Bombing for Choice” link has a problem. Shouldn’t the URL be http://www.radgeek.com/gt/2005/02/01/bombing_for ? The radgeek.com is left out of the code. I’ve seen a few sites that just copy/pasted without looking at it so it’s turning up 404s for them.
haymarketeer replied:
what an eager young programmer type guy like yourslef should do is build a googlebombing sidebar service for bloggers. something akin to blogrolling, except you select from a bunch of pre-submitted bombs.
or maybe that’s just a bad idea….
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Rad Geek replied:
Yep! My bad. When I’m writing here I normally use relative URIs to link within the site. Being a creature of habit, I forgot to stop writing them that way when I was writing HTML to go on other people’s sites. D’oh.
Anyway, it’s been fixed now. I’m e-mailing folks who I know got the wrong code; if you see anyone’s page with a broken link back, just e-mail them a note about the fix.
Thanks!
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protected static replied:
Ironic that the GoogleAds that are being served (at this time, at any rate) are all anti-choice…
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jane replied:
done - great idea!
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Anonymous replied:
It’s also a good idea to give a good title to your blog post when doing this. Google often weights page titles when indexing results. IOW, don’t title your googlebomb post something like “I’m Googlebombing for choice”, title it “Information about Safe, legal abortions and women’s health and rights.” (Or something more grammatically correct…)
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Hippie replied:
Great idea. I’m Bombing for Choice now too :)
Khali replied:
there should always be a choice when it involves our bodies. I’m bombing…
Cantankerous Bitch replied:
Thank you for this.
Too many anti-choice activists are crazy replied:
Since your bombing for choice campaign started because anti-choice roevwade.org was the first google result .. I thought you’d be intereted to know that roevwade.org has apparently been cybersquatted by a poker business.
Richardson Stephanie replied:
They also have the rigt to tell what they think ahbout abortion…and it’s their business. We have democracy in the world. I hope.
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Francois Tremblay replied:
Since when do Anarchists lobby for federal laws?
Rad Geek replied:
Francois,
Since when do Anarchists defend state abortion laws?
The correct answer is that they do neither. The purpose of this GoogleBomb, back when it was launched, was not to lobby for federal laws. It was to promote factual information about abortion, and the relevant Supreme Court rulings, at a time when the top search results provided not accurate information, but rather deceptive anti-choice polemics.
As for my position on Roe, specifically, I’ve said a bit about it in comments on my International Women’s Day post and more recently in my reply to David Gordon. If you have any worries about the position as expressed, those threads would probably be a better place to raise them.