Tom Cruise is Heath Ledger in Spanish

Right now, and for a limited time only, if you visit Google Translate and translate a sentence with Heath Ledger's name in it from English to Spanish, you'll get a result referring to the much maligned Tom Cruise.

So, do the españophones really think that Heath Ledger is a scary whacked out scientologist with control issues?  Maybe, but that doesn't really explain the results.

The concept of Google Bombs isn't new.  Google has been used many times to support the humour of internet culture -- perhaps most famously back in 2003 when the search results for "french military victories" were corrupted to return websites on "french military defeats".

Google has tended to act pretty swiftly to correct the aberrant data, and has implemented a number of changes to their algorithm which are supposed to make faking the search results more difficult, but that just encourages kids to think laterally for their gags.

This latest effort uses the 'suggest a better translation' link, pictured above on the translation page, to submit a translation for Heath's name over and over, until the system accepts it as a high-quality suggestion, supposedly demanded by many legitimate users of their translation service.

These 'bombs' are absolutely hilarious, but they also expose just how easy it is to change search results to whatever you desire.  The funny bombs are obvious and easily corrected, but what about very subtle information doctoring?  If you don't notice, you can't fix it can you?

Google wields unbelievable power to affect the perception of truth for a colossal audience.  It's not the only search engine, but it is the most used, and the most advanced.  If it can be manipulated for kicks, then so can evey other engine.  It also stands to reason that if kids are doing it for the laughs, there are corporations and governments doing it for much less humourous reasons.

Anyway, I couldn't resist making a morph for this post, just because morphing is so damned cool.