It seems that the guys at google have found a way to prevent google boombing.

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs
[...]
Again, the impact of this new algorithm is very limited in scope and impact, but we hope that the affected queries are more relevant for searchers.

Nice. But I have a couple of question

Why now?

Google bombs are around since 2000.
Does it takes six years to find a workaround to google bombing? I don’t think so.

What has changed?

What has changed in their algorithms that made possible to distinguish the “malicious” links to a webpage from the honest ones?
It may be somehow a matter of topic? Are they using the topic sensitive pagerank to give less weight to the “offtopic” links?

Anyway, it works: the first result for “Miserable Failure” is no more George W. Bush biography (I’ll miss that) and the #1 ranking page for “mapelli” it’s now www.mapelli.info, instead of my google guide as it was before. This was not a result of a google bomb, but of something similar: the results of thousands of links pointing to that page with the page title (that included www.mapelli.info)
I’m ok with the new results, it seems that they’ve really improved the search algorithm, but still, I’d like to have some more details of the changes in the algorithm used by google to find the “bad links” … I think they can be just the start of something big.

francesco mapelli