Just something to hold you over until I publish my article on contracts. I discovered that going to Google.com and performing and "I'm Feeling Lucky" search for the word "Failure" will lead you straight to George W. Bush's page at the WhiteHouse.gov website. A normal search shows the same page as the top result.
I doubt Google will be fixing this any time soon, I bet they even did it intentionally, a sort of retaliation to the government's request for their search data. I personally think it's a hilarious little "glitch" and I'd love to see it stay. Put's a smile on my face every time I see it. Maybe someone should contact that WhiteHouse.gov designer and have him add one of those nifty page rank buttons to the footer. George W. Bush, #1 Failure,
3 Comments
April 14, 2006 at 10:38 am
Yet funnily enough, number two is Michael Moore lol.
I hit control-f on both sites and searched the page for “failure,” neither had the word even in the page.
April 14, 2006 at 10:38 pm
This is called a Googlebomb, and there are multiple ones. It isn’t anything hardwired into google; people intentionally put links (in this case, to Bush’s bio) on the internet with the desired bomb text (“failure”). If enough people do it, the google search spider picks it up.
April 17, 2006 at 8:27 am
Yes, it’s based on the weighting of links from other sites, and what keywords are used in those links. Apparently it only takes a relatively small number of links to achieve this kind of result, at least at present.