LMMFAO Google Miserable Failure no longer links BUSH

[LoungeMachine]

Google Halts ‘Miserable Failure’ Link to President Bush

By NOAM COHEN
Published: January 29, 2007

It has been a bad month for anti-Bush snarkiness.

First, the anodyne impressionist Rich Little was selected to address the White House correspondents’ dinner as a follow-up to the scathing routine last year by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert. Now a favored online tactic to mock the president — altering the Google search engine so the words “miserable failure” lead to President Bush’s home page at the White House — has been neutralized.

Google announced on Thursday on its official blog that “by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web” such mischief would instead “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself.

Indeed, a search on Saturday of “miserable failure” on Google leads to a now-outdated BBC News article from 2003 about the “miserable failure” search, rather than the previous first result, President Bush’s portal at whitehouse.gov/president.

Such gamesmanship has been termed “Google bombing,” and is not unique to President Bush, or even politics. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, was linked to the search “waffles,” while other Google bombs have been elaborate jokes or personal vendettas.

Writing on the Google blog, Matt Cutts, the head of the Google’s Webspam team, said that Google bombs had not “been a very high priority for us.” But he added: “Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.”

Mr. Cutts was not available on Friday to expand on his blog, a Google spokeswoman said. A White House spokesman had no comment on the issue.

Despite the changes by Google, some other Google bombs are still operative. A search for “French military victories” still produces a first result that says, “Your search — French military victories — did not match any documents.” Click there and your find a mockup of a Google search page asking the question “Did you mean: French military defeats.”

The organizer of the “miserable failure” Google bomb was George Johnston, a political activist and software programmer in Bellevue, Wash.

What began as a prank become something more after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Johnston said. In September 2005, he said he noticed a renewed interest in the “miserable failure” prank; he believes “people were in shock over New Orleans” and began typing “failure” into their searches. Mr. Johnston said he considered Google’s decision politically motivated, even if was not done by hand, and noted that the company had agreed to censor results in China. “I believe them that they tweaked the algorithm, but it is such weasel words,” he said. “The fact that some Google bombs still work makes me think they have a blacklist essentially of ways of tweaking results.”

He hasn’t given up the fight, he said, and remains unhappy with Google’s tweak. “They say they fixed it. I think they broke it,” he said. NOAM COHEN

[LoungeMachine]

Google's (and Inktomi's) Miserable Failure

By Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief
January 6, 2004

By now, many have learned about how a search for miserable failure on Google brings up the official George W. Bush biography from the US White House web site. Dismissed by Google as not a problem, it points out a case where the real miserable failure is Google itself.

"Google Bombing" like this has happened in the past, and in general, it has little impact on most people. Making a site come up tops for a relatively obscure query such as "miserable failure," which brings back less than 200,000 matches, is much different than exercising some super-control over Google for popular or commonly-performed searches.

I've written about other examples of Google Bombing in the past (Google Bombs Aren't So Scary) and why I think it tends to be overplayed. But in this case, I find myself agreeing with The Register's Andrew Orlowski, who discussed how blogging activity might "googlewash" a term earlier this year. This is when the originating document or original meaning of a term is lost due to new material coming into the search results.

Unlike what Google claims in this latest incident, the results that currently come up for miserable failure do not "reflect the opinion on the web," nor is it true that "no user is hurt" or that there is no "clearly legitimate site for 'miserable failure' being pushed aside."

This Google Bombing was done by at most a few hundred links pointing at the biography, if that many. Google annoyingly makes it impossible to tell exactly how many links are involved using the term, but to say that this particular campaign is the same as the "opinion on the web" is absurd. So only a few hundred people are able to speak for millions of web users? This isn't the web's opinion -- it's a particular opinion on the web.

Users are also hurt, because there are indeed "legitimate" sites for this query that get knocked down in the results.

What's a legitimate site? Seems like the Dick Gephardt For President site deserves top ranking, since he appears to have christened Bush's administration a "miserable failure" as part of his campaign slogan. In short, Gephardt's site is an originating source for this term and actually provides much more useful information for those wondering how it relates to Bush than the biography prank.

Rather than be first, Gephardt is ranked eighth. Only two weeks ago, he was ranked third. At this rate, the game Google's happy for people to play (see new entries of Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore) will have pushed Gephardt's site out of the top results and into oblivion altogether.

Another good listing is an article from the Atlantic Monthly that explores how Gephardt is using "miserable failure" as part of his campaign to attack Bush. Again, this is a far more useful site for users than ranking the Bush biography first. Only two weeks ago, this was ranked second. Now the gaming has pushed it to fifth.

Calling Google Bombing "cybergraffiti" as the New York Times does is appropriate. Google did have good listings for this query, for the few who were probably doing it before this prank emerged. Now, Google appears happy for this blogging campaign (and now new ones) to spray paint whatever it wants above more relevant listings.

Again, most of the time this isn't a big deal. Arguing who should be number one for "talentless hack," a past Google Bomb, is more of an amusement. But "miserable failure" is a campaign slogan in a major US presidential race. What comes up for it matters much more.

By the way, Inktomi also has Bush's biography coming up for miserable failure, underscoring that link manipulation isn't just a Google problem. It's a challenge that Google's most direct crawler-competitor also faces. But Teoma, which uses a unique form of link analysis, has escaped the bombing.

There's at least some good news for Bush. His former campaign store web site is no longer number one on Google for what I'll euphemistically call a search for "dumb Oedipus," as was the case back at the beginning of 2001.

NOTE: There have been many developments since this story was originally written. Search Engine Watch members have access to the Link Bombing page that categorizes some related stories. See also the Googlebombing Now A "Prank" And Not Web's Opinion, Says Google article from Sept. 2005.

[hideyoursheep]

"Talentless hack"links to Sam,I belive.