A GOOGLE bomb — which some Web gurus have suggested is perhaps better called a link bomb, in that it affects most search engines — has typically been thought of as something between a prank and a form of protest. The idea is to select a certain search term or phrase (“borrowed time,” for example), and then try to force a certain Web site (say, the Pentagon’s official Donald H. Rumsfeld profile) to appear at or near the top of a search engine’s results whenever that term is queried.

As Google has explained on the company’s blog, this can be accomplished if enough “determined pranksters” use the selected phrase to both describe — and link to — the chosen site, because “results are generated by computer programs that rank Web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity” of other sites that link to them.

It may be in Google’s interest to think of link bombs as nothing more than pranks, but Clifford Tatum, a doctoral student in communications at the University of Washington, compared them in a paper published in the online journal First Monday (www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_10/) to the “media mindbombs” conceived by the late co-founder of Greenpeace, Bob Hunter.

“Reaching the public consciousness through dramatic, camera-ready opposition to environmental crimes” is how Greenpeace describes Mr. Hunter’s concept.