Kerry gets served up with 'waffles'

By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY

Internet pranskters have set their Web sites on Sen. John Kerry. Some jokers who don't like the Democratic presidential candidate are trying to make his campaign Web site, johnkerry.com, the first answer to a search of the word "waffles" on Google, the No. 1 Internet search engine.

They've nearly succeeded on the No. 2 search engine, Yahoo. By Sunday, eight days after the prank began, johnkerry.com was listed second among 703,000 results of a Yahoo search of the word "waffles."

At the No. 3 search engine, MSN Search, johnkerry.com was also the second Web page result of a search Sunday for "waffles."

On Google, johnkerry.com was not in the top 1,000 of the 556,000 results of a search for "waffles."

Authorities on search engines say the joke's quick impact on Yahoo and MSN, though, is a sign that the campaign is working and that Google will be affected soon.

The high-tech twist on old-fashioned political chicanery follows an Internet prank last year that still tweaks President Bush. Anti-Bush practical jokers made Bush's official biography at whitehouse.gov. the first result of a Google search of the phrase "miserable failure."

Equally clever Bush supporters came to his defense. They've made his biography the No. 1 result of a Google search for "great president."

Web-savvy jokers call a scheme to push Internet users to a specific Web site "Google bombing." It takes a coordinated effort by many Web sites and blogs. "Blog" is short for Web log, a kind of online diary.

The brains behind the waffles stunt is Ken Jacobson, a Duquesne University Law School student. He started the waffles campaign on April 3, when he first posted a blog he calls Esoteric*Diatribe (www .esoteric-diatribe.blogspot.com), which he writes on a personal computer in his Pittsburgh apartment.

"It's political fun and a bit sophomoric," says Jacobson, 23, a native of Canfield, Ohio. "But I believe George W. Bush is a man of conviction and a man of his word. I can't say the same for Sen. Kerry."

"Waffles," Jacobson says, "isn't as mean as 'miserable failure' but says something about what many people feel about Kerry," who Republicans say is a political chameleon. Jacobson says he has had no contact with the Bush campaign. The Kerry campaign had no comment about his effort.

By Sunday, 44 other Web sites and blogs were helping Jacobson.

The trick is fairly simple to accomplish. Basically, Jacobson's plan to manipulate Google will succeed if a large number of Web sites and blogs ?- no one can say how many are needed ?- "link" the word "waffles" to johnkerry.com. Anyone who clicks on that word when viewing any of those sites will be sent to Kerry's site.

One of the things that Google's software looks for when it ranks search results is how many links there are from the queried word or phrase to particular Web sites. The more links from "waffles" to Kerry's site, the greater the chance that johnkerry.com will be a top search result.

Jacobson hopes johnkerry.com is in the top 100 of Google search results for "waffles" by midsummer and No. 1 by Election Day. It took slightly more than five weeks for the "miserable failure" campaign to push Bush's biography to No. 1.

Google processes about 200 million search requests a day. It handles nearly 41% of all searches. Yahoo handles about 27%. MSN Search accounts for nearly 20%.

Chris Sherman, associate editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, a Web site that tracks the search engine industry, says, "Google is a miserable failure for allowing these things to occur." He says "a small subset of people with clear agendas" are skewing search results.

But Craig Silverstein, Google's technology director, says, "Our philosophy is that there's no need (for Google) to do anything." Even search results fueled by "Google bomb" campaigns "are appropriate," Silverstein says. "There's an association that people make from the word or phrase to the results."

Also, Silverstein says, few people are affected by search results skewed by Google bombs. "Miserable failure" isn't a term that is searched very often. "Waffle recipe" is a more likely search request than "waffles."

Sherman says the most likely reason Yahoo was affected so quickly is that it must have recently updated the "index" of Web pages it searches to include Jacobson's blog or the other sites involved in the waffles campaign.

Search engines such as Yahoo and Google constantly update their indexes, but obscure sites such as Jacobson's blog sometimes aren't detected right away by the search engines' computers. The search engines "crawl" the Internet all the time but don't scan new or rarely visited sites every day.

Yahoo does not disclose how many such pages are in its index. Google says it has 4.3 billion. Sherman says that since Yahoo has already been affected by the waffles prank, Google almost surely will be soon.

Sherman says media coverage such as this newspaper story will help Jacobson and other pranksters achieve their objectives by drawing attention to their efforts.