Gaming the Search Engine in a Political Season

As a society we have become so reliant on the internet that we turn to it as an ultimate source of knowledge for almost anything now. So when pranksters set up “link bombs” through Google it can have a bigger effect than one might anticipate. A link bomb is a prank set up so when certain words or phrases are searched those words or phrases are linked and the user will be redirected to the linked content. It has become and issue with the upcoming election because some pranksters linked names of republican candidates to about 50 sites containing negative information about the candidate so rather than the user receiving non-objective information about the candidate the user only receives that the person that set up the link bomb wants them to receive.