Got a beef with the media? Throw a Google bomb

By Pendar Yousefi - Varsity Staff
The gulf you are looking for does not exist. Try Persian Gulf."
That is what you see if you Google "Arabian Gulf" and click on "I'm feeling lucky," the search button that automatically takes you to the first result of your search. It is a successful implementation of what is known as a Google bomb, first proposed in my blog, and planted by thousands of internet users and bloggers last week.

It started with National Geographic's decision to include the term 'Arabian Gulf' as an alternative to 'Persian Gulf' in its latest edition of its influential Atlas of the World. They have also renamed the Iranian territories of the Lavan and Kish islands, using foreign Arabic names, and undermined Iranian sovereignty over three other Iranian Islands that have been claimed by the U.A.E. That ruffled a lot of Iranian feathers, including mine.

The issue of naming this particular body of water has long been a sensitive subject between Iranians and Arabs. Historically, this body of water has been called the Persian Gulf in almost all ancient languages. It was consistently labeled as the Persian Gulf even on maps drawn by prominent Arab geographers. However, since the 1960s and with the rise of Arab nationalism, pan-Arabists led by late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and followed by Saddam Hussein, have tried to re-name it the Arabian Gulf.

As a result of the National Geographic incident, Iranians came together last week in various forms - most prominently in cyberspace - to protest against the issue. While Iran officially banned National Geographic reporters and sales of the magazine, several petitions were also passed around the internet, with one gathering more than 47,000 signatures as of the writing of this article.

In my opinion, though, the striking display of protest was through the implementation of the Google bomb. A Google bomb is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by Google, which can be achieved if a large number of webpages that contain the same keyword all link to a specific site. It has been used before in a number of occasions, most notably in the past with the search query "miserable failure," which returns a biography of the US president George Bush as its first result.

Several days after the incident, I pitched the idea of using a Google bomb to voice our objection on my blog (www.legofish.com). I set up a simple page, similar to Internet Explorer's "Page not found" 404 error screen stating that "No body of water by the name of Arabian Gulf exists." I also provided some historical facts through links to other sites. I asked other bloggers to link to that page and, before I knew it, hundreds of bloggers from all over the world and different backgrounds were in on it. Within three days of my original post the page reached number one in Google's search results for "Arabian Gulf".

This has proved, more than anything, the astonishing power of blogs. The number of Iranian bloggers has risen astronomically over the past few years, so much so that in a recent survey of all internet blogs categorized by language, Persian (a.k.a. Farsi) ranked third.

Even though some attempts have recently been made by the Iranian authorities to limit this virtual medium, for many Iranians the internet still remains the number one outlet for free expression. This latest movement is a perfect indication of that.