Google defuses Bush Bomb
p2pnet.net News:- Below were the first three results when we did a search for ‘miserable failure’ in Google at 5:15 pst
BBC NEWS | Americas | ‘Miserable failure’ links to Bush
Web users manipulate a popular search engine so an unflattering description leads to the president’s page.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3298443.stm – 32k – Cached – Similar pages
Political Google bombs – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Two of the first google bombs were the “Miserable Failure” google bomb linked to George W. Bush’s Whitehouse biography and the “Waffles” google bomb that …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs – 41k – Cached – Similar pages
Google’s (and Inktomi’s) Miserable Failure
A search for miserable failure on Google brings up the official George W. Bush biography from the US White House web site. Dismissed by Google as not a …
searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3296101 – 53k – Cached – Similar pages
The fourth was the same and the fifth led to an About.com ‘political humour‘ post + pic and, “George W. Bush stands on the USS Lincoln under a banner that says Miserable Failure.”
In fact all of the entries on the first page, and most of them on the second (we didn’t bother to go any further ; ) produced similar findings.
On September 16, 2005, this appeared on the official Google Blog:
If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part.
It’s called GoogleBombing and now, almost a year-and-a-half later, The New York Times says, “a favored online tactic to mock the president – altering the Google search engine so the words ‘miserable failure’ lead to President Bush’s home page at the White House – has been neutralized.
“Google announced on Thursday on its official blog that ‘by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web’ such mischief would instead ‘typically return commentary, discussions, and articles’ about the tactic itself,” says the story.
So what is GoogleBombing and how does it work?
Explains Marissa Mayer, the company’s director of consumer web products, in the 2005 blog post:
Google’s search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them.
By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases.
We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.
Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.
Now you know ; P
Also See:
The New York Times – Google Halts ‘Miserable Failure’ Link to President Bush, January 29, 2007
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