Go to google and do this, quick before they change it. It is hilarious. My question is, why do things like this happen on the Internet. Any computer experts out there who can ex[plain how this might occur?
1-Go to Google ( http://www.google.com )
2- Type in the word “Failure”
3- Instead of clicking “Google Search,” click “I’m Feeling Lucky.”
4- see search results.
5- Spread the word before the people at Google “fix” it
After you do that one, replace “failure” with “asshole” for one that’s even better.
I sense the Google team is not pro-Bush.
There’ll be no ‘fixing’: Official Google Blog: Googlebombing 'failure'
These are old “Google bombs” and are not made by Google.
Google bomb at Wikipedia explains the mechanism.
It’s a technique known as a Googlebomb.
During the last election, the Googlebombers rigged it so if you typed in “Waffle” it would take you to John Kerry’s site.
It has to do with numerous blog links and the like. The folks at Google have nothing to do with it, and actually discourage it.
On Preview: Damn, you’re fast, Sam!
Not fast enough! 
Some were faster. 
You’re right. I only scrolled down enough to see Sam’s reply.
GorillaMan and Revtim - good job in beating this old man to a reply I actually knew, dammitt…
ISTR that one could type a phrase into MS-Word, use the thesaurus(?), and come up with a phrase about Bill Gates not being able to achieve an erection. Does anyone remember this?
Since I guess this is technically supposedly a General Question, and not a political troll, and two mods already “answered” with links to wikipedia…
The short answer is you get hundreds of popular blogs to link the phrase Perfect Master to Cecil Adams, and Violin!
I don’t know that one, but if you type NYC in Wingdings font, you get a skull, a star of David and a thumbs-up. This caused some fretting a while back by people who, like the ones that set up googlebombs, have way too much time on their hands.
I’d never heard this before, so maybe somebody else has worked it out already. If you assume the Wingdings were set up with some sort of mnemonics, then maybe:
N = Numb --> skull
Y = Yiddish --> star of David
C = Correct --> thumbs up
So it could be construed as innocent. However, I don’t know if similar things apply to other letters, and have no desire to find out for myself.
Just riffing on a notion here.
The one I’m aware of was that in MS Word you typed in a phrase like “Bill Clinton should be fired.” highlighted it, hit the dictionary and it responded with “I’ll drink to that.”
As I recall, that one happened with any phrase containing “should”. So you could get Word to drink equally to “Clinton should be impeached” and “Clinton should be deified”.
The NYC one is just a coincidence. There’s no particular pattern of what letter maps to what symbol. Given that the symbols they had included a star of David, a skull and crossbones, and a thumbs-up, it was inevitable that some three-letter string would turn into “NYC”. And any given three-letter string is going to crop up somewhere or another.
And I’ve never heard that Google discouraged Google-bombings. As I recall, their official response is that Google merely reflects the sentiments of the Web as a whole, and if the predominant sentiment of the Web as a whole is that Bush is a failure, then that’s what Google will show.
Another Wingdings one had to do with typing WTC, it somehow gave a combination of things that looked like two buildings and an aircraft.
I just tried typing the alphabet, with caps lock, in Wingdings…try it, it’s fascinating…
It starts off with a Churchillian vulgarity, then goes through a complex handshake which is surely of masonic origin. After that is a smiley face, a neutral face and a sad face - that can only mean one thing, surely?! Bombs, toxic attakcs, nuclear reactions (in the sun), a plane (if you look carefully you can see a missile under the fuselage), oil, not global warming because it’s a liberal lie, death death DEATH, WW2, Israel, OMG THE MUSLIMS TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!111one11!1!"£234!!!
Heh, and after that, I tried ‘SDMB’ in Wingdings…try it!!
Valteron, if you like this, also try “mouton insignifiant” in Google.
Right now “waffle” is taking me to Waffle House. I searech for “waffle” + “google bomb” and only got acouple right-wing blogs saying that they wanted to make it happen, but no evidence that it ever did. I think they may have stumbled on this one because there are corporate interests that have reason to desire being highly ranked for “waffle” searches; not so for “miserable failure”.
Another famous google bomb is “weapons of mass destruction”.