Nigritude Ultramarine
Nigritude ultramarine is a term created by
SearchGuild to test methods and best approaches for
search engine optimization (the process
of modifying a web page's contents and links to ensure a high ranking in
a search engine). The specific target
of interest was the Google search engine.
The phrase was chosen because Google initially showed no results for it,
so the competition would not adversely affect results for anything real.
The phrase is also a rough synonym for 'dark blue'.
Competition
The contest ran from May 7, 2004 to July 7, 2004. Two prizes
were awarded for the top position in a Google search: one for the top
position on 9am GMT on June 7, 2004, and a second prize awarded at the close
of the contest on 9am GMT July 7, 2004.
There were about two hundred competitors, who deployed an astonishing
variety of dirty tricks, from Google bombing
upwards. The competitive conditions encouraged intensive, free use of
techniques that would have otherwise been used in a more conservative
manner, and it is entirely possible that some normally-legitimate SEOs took
a dirty approach for the occasion. Weblogs and wikis were hit by the
contest, and needed to be constantly policed to prevent "nigritude
ultramarine" spam from lowering their signal-to-noise ratio below acceptable
limits. Public wiki sandboxes were especially vulnerable.
On July 7, Six Apart Vice President and weblogger Anil Dash was announced as
the contest winner. Dash stated that his goal in entering the contest was to
"prove that real content trumps all the shady optimization tricks that
someone can figure out". Instead of resorting to such tactics, he simply
wrote a weblog entry and asked his readers to link to it. Another competitor
took this idea further and wrote the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ, which placed
sixth overall, won the "Judge's Choice" award, and remains a valuable source
of information about the competition.
Afterlife
Since the end of the formal competition, the evolution of
the Google results for nigritude ultramarine remains an enlightening area of
study. As of November 7, 2005, the top two Google results are the blog entry
that won the competition and the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ.
It is known that Google generally tries to detect and penalise dirty tricks,
and nigritude ultramarine makes an obvious test case. An important open
question remains whether Google has treated nigritude ultramarine specially
in any way; the notoriously secretive company has refused to comment. It is
possible that they have applied special attention to the "nigritude
ultramarine" in order to improve the results in this prominent case.
However, as of September 2004, the Google results do not appear
hand-crafted, and several insipid pages appear high—although lower than they
did during the competition—on the search page. More likely, but also
unproven, is that Google has studied the techniques applied to nigritude
ultramarine in order to improve their dirty-trick-penalising code.
Comparison of search results for nigritude ultramarine during and after the
competition is complicated by the change the competition has caused to the
meaning of the phrase. Before, it was purely a nonsense phrase that could
not possibly be searched for by anyone looking for any real resource. Now it
refers primarily to the competition itself, and is a natural phrase to use
to find information about the competition. (As of September 5, 2004, the
highest Google result that is an official competition page is SearchGuild's,
which is ranked 18th.) It is also natural for someone to search for the
phrase to find out why it appears on so many webpages. (The Nigritude
Ultramarine FAQ, ranked second as of September 5, 2004, is an excellent
resource for this.)
Furthermore, due to the nature of web searching, any web-based reporting
about the nigritude ultramarine competition, including this encyclopedia
article, feeds back and affects the search results in question. (As of
November 13, 2005, this Wikipedia article ranked 3rd on the results page.)
This effect was previously noticed in the reporting of
Googlewhacks, and takes a more complex form
in this case.
Similar terms in other languages
-
Czech: "Běžešelemovací řůčovičky"
-
German: Hommingberger Gepardenforelle,
Schnitzelmitkartoffelsalat,
Rasenfeldmeister, Hyborischer Kackvogel, Kebapgraz
-
English: "Cheetah Trout of Hommingberg" (There is no
such trout species, and there is no town or village with the name
Hommingberg.)
See also
External links
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