LISNews posted about the new usability site set up at the University of Michigan Library.
Seth writes about a google bombing campaign to push martinlutherking.org further down the list of google results. I found this slightly amusing, because one of the reasons why the hate site has such great google juice is due to plenty of people linking to it as part of a library instruction internet evaluation lesson.
5:33 pm on February 2nd, 2007 1
We had our own “martinlutherking.org moment” last week at my workplace. We’re a K-5 school, and the library computers are filtered. A class of 4th graders was in the library researching Dr. King for our school assembly. When they typed his name into Google, the hate site popped up in the results - and the filter hadn’t even blocked it. Some of them had clicked on it before I noticed. I had to do an awful lot of explaining to the kids about why they shouldn’t believe anything on the site.
The kids who saw it were upset for days afterwards. Several of them came up to me at different times and asked why the bad racist people hate Dr. King so much.
2:37 pm on February 4th, 2007 2
That is really too bad for the kids - I guess it shows how little you can really trust filters. That site has been around for such a long time, it is nuts it wasn’t on a block list for the filter.