The Battle for the 2008 US Congressional Elections on the Web
Panagiotis Metaxas, Eni Mustafaraj · 2009
It has been reported that, in the past, political activists have tried to influence web search results. They did that using link-bombing techniques to raise negative web pages with contents close to the their agendas to the top-10 search results. Google has admitted that this happen in the 2006 US Elections, but did it still happen in the all-important 2008 US Congressional Elections? In this paper we try to evaluate whether “gaming” the search engines during the election period is a widespread problem, how serious is it, and how search engines have tried to maintain the integrity of their search results.