Google Trends: Curious About Chappaquiddick or Google Bomb by the Right?

With news of the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy media outlets have been searching for phrases and narratives to put his death in the proper historic context. It’s true that sometimes no one’s really sure about how we feel about an event or news item — then Google Trends comes along and tells what people are most curious about. Or, there is a right-wing effort to gin the system via “Google Bombing“.

A quick look at Google Trends tells us that there is a vast amount of interest in Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne. But there is already a lot of chatter on Twitter that suggests that the preponderance of search queries listed by Google Trends is a result of right-wing “Google Bombing” – a practices intended to influence the ranking of particular pages, in results returned by the Google search engine.