Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
Posted on: May 31, 2008
After just over two years, Google has finally defused the “Google Bomb” that has returned US President George W. Bush at the top of its results in a search on miserable failure. The move wasn’t a post-State Of The Union Address gift for Bush. Instead, it’s part of an overall algorithm change designed to stop such mass link pranks from working.
A search today now shows the US White House page carrying Bush’s name is no longer top listed. Also gone are pages about Michael Moore and former US president Jimmy Carter that were on the first page of results due to Google bombing actions.
What’s not missing are articles about the Google bombing incident itself, including my own article I wrote back in January 2004 from when I worked at Search Engine Watch. The algorithm change hasn’t impacted these.
This is because the change is designed to stop the pranks from happening rather than legitimate commentary about such activities. Google isn’t saying exactly how this is being done. But Google says it’s done automatically, without any human intervention.
“It’s completely algorithmic,” said Google spam fighting czar Matt Cutts, adding “we’re not going to claim it’s 100 percent perfect.”
Why the change? Too many people are misunderstanding that Google itself is not somehow endorsing the particular views of these bombs. From Google’s statement on the Google Webmaster Central blog about today’s change:
People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.
There have been a variety of Google bombs over the years (such as on this list), but the Bush bomb is most famous. It came to light in December 2003, after a grassroots campaign started two months earlier by George Johnston of the Old Fashion Patriot blog began to work. From Johnston’s instructions:
Let’s get everyone to link to http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html with the words “Miserable Failure” Our goal is to make Shrubya the top google pick.
It’s fun, it’s easy just Miserable Failure in your favorite web page will look like Miserable Failure
When the campaign succeeded, Google came under fire but argued no one was “hurt” by the activity. From a New York Time article in December 2003:
Craig Silverstein, Google’s director for technology, says the company sees nothing wrong with the public using its search engine this way. No user is hurt, he said, because there is no clearly legitimate site for “miserable failure” being pushed aside.
Moreover, he said, Google’s results were taking stock of the range of opinions that are expressed online. “We just reflect the opinion on the Web,” he said, “for better or worse.”
Huffington Post - huffingtonpost.wordpress.com 
Leave a comment