Friday, December 05, 2003

Google bombing

Apparently there are a few people who have fun Google Bombing. If you don't know, Google bombing is manipulating Google to do what you want it to do, not what it should do. A good example of this is manipulating the search term "miserable failure" to point to the official President Bush bio on the White House Web page.

Now, the phrase "miserable failure" does not appear anywhere in the bio, but by putting the phrase on several sites and then linking to the bio, Google attributes the bio site to the phrase. Even though this story has been out for a bit, a search done right now on "miserable failure" still gets this #1 result on Google:

Biography of President George W. Bush
Home > President > Biography President George W. Bush En Espanol.
George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States. He ...
Description: Biography of the president from the official White House web site.
Category: Kids and Teens > School Time > ... > Bush, George Walker
www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html - 29k - Cached - Similar pages