Politics Rick Santorum Asked Google to Un-Bomb His Name

Rick Santorum would like his name back. Unfortunately for him, it’s long gone.



Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has previously expressed his displeasure that his last name has been co-opted to mean santorum (san-TOR-um [n.] the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex) but he revealed for the first time Tuesday in an interview with Politico that he had actually contacted Google to request that the company remove the offending definition from the web—of course, to no avail.

Santorum seems to imply that in failing to reverse Dan Savage’s santorum phenomenon Google is somehow taking sides against him. Displaying a typical baby-boomer ignorance about how the internet works, he said, “to have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” he continued.
Santorum obviously fails to grasp that Google is not a “website” or even a curated “system” that hand selects content to champion, but rather like the plumbing that simply connects the web according to relevance.
And Santorum is doubly wrong with his Joe Biden example. A quick Google search for Joe Biden or Barack Obama will turn up plenty of web pages with filthy invective, some comparing the president to Hitler, which I’m pretty sure is a deeper offense than santorum’s colloquial definition. Santorum expects Google to leave such profanity in place for the president and vice president, but intervene to shift the winds of the internet on his behalf?

According to Compete the website hosting the new definition of santorum (spreadingsantorum.com) received 24,000 visitors in August whereas Rick Santorum’s campaign website (ricksantorum.com) received 17,000. In May spreadingsantorum received over 108,000, a multiple higher than ricksantorum.com has ever performed in a month—and this in the middle of Santorum’s campaign.

While Rick Santorum is running far behind Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry in the primary race and his long-shot presidential campaign will likely turn out to be a flash in the Republican pan, the word colloquial word santorum has stood alone without competition since Dan Savage created the word and drove it to popular adoption in 2003.

That’s 8 years—already the length of two presidential terms. It’s likely that the word santorum will be more relevant to the Google algorithm and indeed the world than Rick Santorum the politician for years to come. When his career is over, it will probably prove to be Santorum’s legacy.
That’s one shitty legacy.