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The search engine has previously tolerated Googlebombs, since the first was spotted in 2000. Although it did not condone them, as recently as 2005 it expressed a reluctance to manually alter its search results. However the increased use of the technique for political ends concerned the company, because it believed that users attributed the opinions expressed by the results to Google itself.

The change of policy was explained in Google's webmaster blog.

'Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us,' Matt Cutts wrote. 'But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.'

The company had already been begun minimising the impact of many Googlebombs, by improving its analysis of the link structure of the Web. Now they will typically return commentary, discussions, and

Clearly unsatisfied with this approach, it decided to develop an algorithm that helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages. It does not claim that it will find every instance, but hopes that the affected queries will return results that are more relevant for searchers.

Googlebombs - sometimes called linkbombs since they are not specific to Google - refers to an attempt to cause a website to rank highly for an 'obscure or meaningless' query. Google notes that Googlebombs very rarely happen for common queries; the lack of any relevant results for the query is part of why a Googlebomb can work.

Typically someone will persuade a large number of website administrators to link the query to a certain page. The first recorded Googlebomb was the linking of the phrase 'more evil than satan himself' to the Microsoft homepage. In 2001 Adam Mathes was credited with coining the term Googlebombing after getting the query 'talentless hack' to return the website of a friend.

Other famous 'bombs include 'miserable failure' linking to the official George W Bush biography and, following France's opposition to America's invasion of Iraq, getting 'french military victories' to return no results at all [see picture].

These may be considered humorous, although the second conveniently ignores Napoleon's conquests (though he was Corsican), the tool has recently been used for overtly political purposes. During the 2006 mid-term elections in the US, left-leaning bloggers linked Republican candidates' names to negative articles about them.

However there is at least one instance where the practice has been used to the good. In 2004 Jewish writer Daniel Sieradski urged readers of his blog to link 'Jew' to the corresponding Wikipedia article after discovering that it was returning an anti-Semitic website as the number one result.