Welcome to Twench's Technical Jargon Explained. An occasional segment featured here to help the techno-n00b deal with the ever expanding digital vocabulary. Today's phrase is "google bomb". To google-bomb is to manipulate google's search engine so that a particularly search term will return a predetermined web page. For example, enter the phrase miserable failure into google. Notice the first web page returned. This was made possible by hundreds of thousands of people who linked to the biography of George Bush using the phrase miserable failure.

In very simple terms, Google ranks pages by counting the number of times a particular phrase is used to link to that page. So, if I want to help an author get famous, making a link as follows: World's Greatest Author, helps move that page up google's rank. Now, just having one person do this is not nearly enough. However, the more people who make the link World's Greatest Author, the high up google ranks the page when the term "world's greatest author" is entered.

That's it for today kids! Any questions, feel free to email me at brown@chrispy.net. Stay tuned for another installment of Twench's Technical Jargon Explained!