On the advice of an e-mail I just googled the word “failure” and the first site listed is a biography of George W Bush.
No matter what you think of him, that’s just weird.
Did someone hack Google?
Or did they actually go to the effort to get a site to top a google search for “failure” and then put the GWB stuff their??
It’s ODD.
It’s called Googlebombing. That’s actually the best known example, where the phrase “miserable failure” was linked to George Bush.
If you have a few thousand websites or a few hundred people who do, you can do that yourself.
I wouldn’t call it hacking Google, but they’ve tricked it.
Google’s algorithms partly use link text to determine a site’s ranking. So, if a lot of sites link to http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb with the text “The Straight Dope”, it increases the ranking of that page in searches for that text. The degree of affect a link has on rankings is related to the popularity of the site it’s on, so a link from CNN.com would have a more significant effect on the linked page’s ranking than one from Joe’s Discount Floor Tile Superstore.
So, what’s happened here is that a lot of jokesters with popular sites (usually blogs) decided to link to Bush’s biography on whitehouse.gov with the text “miserable failure” (apparently this has gained enough momentum for “failure” alone to work as well). And thus…
Some people call this a failure of Google, but I disagree. Their engine is accurately reflecting the content of the web.
This is known as a Google bomb, where users manipulate the Google search rankings by linking to a site using certain anchor text. In W’s case, his official White House bio was linked to via the words miserable failure.
Jeez. Spend some time to verify the links and look what happens!
Thanks for link to wikipediae (sp). This stuff has been around for years. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it. Feelin’ out of the loop. :wally
Since this one is answered, I’m closing it. If anyone wants to continue a discussion, perhaps MPSIMS, IMHO, GD, depending on what you’re trying to say.
samclem GQ moderator