Chris Bowers of Open Left has started a project called "Searching for John McCain" in which he wants bloggers and others to create a "Googlebomb" designed to get MSM articles that have negative information on John McCain to the top of that search engine's results: openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6044

The approach is supposedly more sophisticated than his similar effort of a couple years ago, in that he's selected nine articles that people can link.

However, there are a few things he forgot to mention. Such as the fact that Google will probably take this into account since there are only nine articles involved and the results could be modified to keep those in their current location through some means. In any case, Google probably has filters in place that recognize blatant attempts to skew their results, as can be seen in the comments left at the Open Left link.

And, he wants people to link McCain's name in comments, but what he doesn't realize is that most sites put nofollow tags on links in comments or elsewhere, as I well know. So, in those cases that might be counter-productive, leading to the pages where those comments are left having a higher rank than the ones Bowers wants. Note that Open Left and (last I checked) MyDD.com are two sites that don't use nofollow tags, so if anyone has an account there they could take advantage of that.

And, while large numbers of people are no doubt searching for "John McCain" right now, many more are searching for his last name plus a certain topic, and the like. Those are less competitive, and someone searching for things like that want specific information that they might be using in a decision. Bowers offers nothing for those people.

Now, there's certainly the risk that someone from his side will read this and modify Bowers' grand scheme, but this site doesn't support McCain in the first place and in the second those who oppose Obama can play the same game, only better.

For instance, a search for obama immigration has that post in 34th place, and with a few links - with varied link text such as obama immigration position or barack obama on immigration - it could go higher and I'd respond by putting even more negative information in that post.

Sadly, a search for questions for obama only gets that page at almost 200th place, but with more links - and once again with varied link text - it could go higher.

So, let's all start to link, and if Obama opponents take my advice they should be much more effective that Bowers would like.