Until a few days ago if you typed “miserable failure” into Google, the first result that appeared was George Bush’s biography at whitehouse.gov.

Google moves to limit Google bombs

No one at Google was to blame for this quirk. It was actually the work of a group of web site owners headed by Washington-based political activist George Johnston, who had created a Google bomb, effectively manipulating the Google search results.

How this Google bomb worked was that a critical mass of web site owners linked the words “miserable failure” on pages of their web sites to George Bush’s biography page. This caused Google to link the words “miserable failure” to George Bush’s biography.

A neat trick, even if it is very nasty.

Google has now improved the way its search engine analyzes link structure to limit the impact of many Google bombs.

“Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us,”  wrote Google’s Matt Cutts, on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blogg.

“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.”

Other victims have included movie maker Mike Moore, who was also liked to “miserable failure” and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who was linked “waffle”.

Not all Google bombs have been diffused. Try typing “French military victories” into Google, and the first entry you should find is spoof page entitled “French military defeats”.

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Entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 2:49 pm under Google, Technology, Web2.0.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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