Anjing Buka Puasa: Google’s ‘Answer’ To Malaysian Premier?

Being a person who is heavily involved in search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), Google search engine (SE) is no stranger to me. My everyday research deals with Google  from resource searching, keyword analysis and many more interesting stuff that this SE can do for me. However, as for today, some smart-ass discovered something funny that you will be stunned  -an SE surprise!

Try typing ‘Najib Buka Puasa’ in Google (regardless of geo location), and walla, the SERP (search engine result pages) returns that doggone break fasting thingy phrase similar to my entry title. How is that so?

anjing buka puasa, Not cool eh?

SEO and search engine indexing works in unique ways that commoners like us had hard time understanding let alone figuring out how the SE algorithm works. Not only that, not many of us could comprehend how the search engine digest each and every word from different languages across the globe in their nifty database.

What I can think of is perhaps, the word ‘Najib’ is the closest match to ‘anjing’ in Google’s Bahasa Melayu database.

Image Credits: itsnotforthecock.co.uk

Even if you scramble the word from ‘Najib’, minus the ‘b’; ‘n’,’a’,’j’ and ‘i’ are all in the ‘anjing’ word. The search engine is smart enough (and lucky enough) not to use ‘najis’ as the replacement of ‘anjing’. This is because only living things (by logic) can break fast i.e. ‘buka puasa’. That is why the closest match goes to ‘anjing’ and not ‘najis’.

I can’t imagine what will happen if ‘najis’ is being use instead of ‘anjing’? Would the government present Google a lawsuit? However, this (najib buka puasa) is not an act of Google Bombing (aka SEO bombing) just like what happened to George Bush in 2006 when Google Bombers uses ‘miserable failure‘ as an anchor text linking to his (George Bush’s) office in White House as a way of protesting and showing defiance against his Iraq war policies.

Check the image below:

Google Bombing George Bush Miserable Failure

Google bombing is easy to perform and it can happen effectively if masses of people behaved in a similar fashion using similar anchor texts in highly ranked blogs & websites with massive traffic.

So for those who is not aware of the linking power in SEO, do think twice about using the right anchors before linking to something or somebody as you might not know the after-effects of doing so. That is why subset of SEO such as ‘online reputation management’ appears to help counter attack the damage done by SEO and social media bombing and to undo the damage by knocking them out of the SERPs.

Interesting eh?

Disclaimer: This entry is not meant to belittle our Prime Minister but merely explains what SEO can do and the implications of it.