President George Bush is a failure once more on Google
By John Pospisil
Until mid January of this year if you typed “miserable failure” into Google, the first result that appeared was President George Bush’s biography. Google fixed the problem, which was caused by a Google Bomb attack. Now a similar peculiarity has appeared; simply typing “failure” into Google will bring up President Bush’s home page. This time the Whitehouse has only itself to blame.
The original ”miserable failure” attack 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 Google’s 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.
Google improved the way its search engine analyzed link structure to limit the impact of many Google bombs, and so typing “miserable failure” no longer brought up President Bush’s biography.
So what caused this recent “failure” peculiarity? Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land explains:
“The White House used the word “failure” on Bush’s page, which resulted in the page becoming relevant for the query again. If the White House was smart, they’d have realized it can never ever ever ever use the words “miserable” or “failure” or both of them together without risking showing up in Google’s top results for searches on those words.”
The text on Bush’s home page that reactivated the Google Bomb was this:
“The bottom line is this: Congress’s failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines.”
Sullivan theorizes that Google’s Smart Bomb fix works by checking to see whether the target web page has any of the same words as in the Google Bomb links. If it does, Google assumes that the association is legitimate.
The reference to “failure” is no longer on President Bush’s home page, as it was simply a news item. If Sullivan is right, the association should disappear soon, and President Bush will be a failure no more on Google.
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