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Did Google fix the "miserable failure" Google bomb for President Bush?
16 comments- IT TOPICS:Government & Regulation, Networking
Up until a few days ago, if you typed in the term "miserable failure" on Google, the top search result would be President Bush's White House home page. No longer, and a programmer and political activist claims it's because Google has essentially cheated on its own search results in order to help the president.
The previous "miserable failure" results were the result of a "Google bomb," in which a large number of sites use the same term, and link that term back to the same page --- for example, linking the words "miserable failure" to http://www.whitehouse.gov/president.
But the "miserable failure" Google bomb no longer works. The top link is now a more than three-year-old article from the BBC about the "miserable failure" Google bombing issue.
The New York Times reports that the Google blog last Thursday noted that in an attempt to thwart Google bombs, Google had changed its search algorithm in unspecified ways to stop them.
On a Google blog, Matt Cutts, who heads Google's anti-spam team, says that "The impact of this new algorithm is very limited in scope and impact, but we hope that the affected queries are more relevant for searchers."
Limited scope is right. Other Google bombs still work. For example, the Times notes, type in the term "French military victories," and the top result is a spoof page that reports, "Your search - french military victories - did not match any documents" and asks "Did you mean: french military defeats."
The brains behind the miserable failure Google bomb, political activist and programmer George Johnston, believes that Google changed the algorithm specifically to kill the Bush Google bomb, but leave others intact.
"The fact that some Google bombs still work makes me think they have a blacklist essentially of ways of tweaking results," he told the Times.
In other words, they changed the "miserable failure" Google bomb, but not others.
I don't know the truth of whether Google specifically changed the "miserable failure" Google bomb. Considering that other Google bombs work, though, it wouldn't surprise me, particularly because Google is becoming increasingly involved in Washington politics, and this would certainly help its lobbying efforts.
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