ZabaSearch and Google bombing
By Charles Miller

This week I have been thinking over a couple of otherwise seemingly unrelated subjects. The first subject to receive my attention was an article I read expressing concern over the website ZabaSearch.com.

The site is billed as “one of the most comprehensive personal-data search engines on the net.” People’s reactions seem always to be either terror or unconcern. Which of those reactions often depends on whether you are searching for someone else’s data, or your own.

ZabaSearch makes it easier than ever to find comprehensive personal information on anyone. If you are willing to pay the fee, ZabaSearch will quickly find names, addresses, phone numbers and all the other information you would expect to find in the telephone directory.

But a lot of far more personal information is available, including unlisted phone numbers, dates of birth, aliases, tax liens, Social Security numbers, bankruptcy and criminal records, divorces, employment history, vehicle registrations and even satellite imagery of people’s homes.

Critics say ZabaSearch is exploiting the lack of data privacy in today’s world. But enough of that subject for the moment.

The second subject is “Google bombing.” During the 2004 US presidential election, the first Google bombs were dropped. Two of the first were the “miserable failure” Google bomb that linked a search for those two words to the White House website and the biography of George W. Bush. The second was the “waffles” Google bomb that linked search results for that word to Democrat candidate John Kerry’s website. Those who created the Google bombs were successfully able to manipulate Google search engine rankings so that searches for “miserable failure” and “waffles” returned links to the targeted sites.

This was accomplished by having many hundreds of websites link to the White House website and refer to the link as a miserable failure. Over a period of time as the Google search robots crawled around the internet indexing all of those pages, the search engine started giving a higher and higher rating to “miserable failure” and the site it was linked to. The more links it found on the internet, the higher the Google rating went.

I cannot fault the electronic robots at Google for doing what they were programmed to do, but to all those people who spent their time fooling the search engine—well, you need to get a life. Google responded to all of this by developing an algorithm to detect Google bombs. They say they do not use it all the time because it takes so much computing power and because true Google bombs are thankfully rare.

So what do these two subjects have to do with one another? If you look into ZabaSearch a little, you will learn they do not maintain a database of their own. It is a search engine algorithm which queries the information in other websites and public information databases. We can only wonder how long it will take somebody to engineer and perpetrate a ZabaSearch bomb.


Results displayed by popular search engines are subject to manipulation and so today it pays to be a bit suspicious of many things you might otherwise take to be fact. This is especially true of the internet, where from time to time the attempt to provide or receive true and accurate information is sometimes—a miserable failure.


Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044 (415) 101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.