wols.
Googlebombing 'failure'
9/16/2005 12:54:00 PM
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products
If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase
[miserable failure], the top result is currently the White Houses
official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some
complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a
political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results
come up in order to allay these concerns.
Google's search results are generated by computer programs that
rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative
popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice
called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can
occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of
webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to
describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to
the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the
practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect
the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to
alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from
showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they
don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose
objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.
