Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Google geeks drop a bomb on Mr. Bush

PATRICIA BEST

An e-mail making the rounds these days has these instructions:

1. Go to http://www.google.com.

2. Type in Failure, then click "search."

3. Look at it, and laugh at what comes up first.

4. Let others know before Google fixes it.

What comes up first is "George W. Bush, Biography of the 43rd President of the United States." It is the genuine article -- from the official White House website.

So how does Mr. Bush come in Numero Uno under the search term failure? We mean, technically, how does he come in first place? Turns out to be "Googlebombing," the product of "pranksters" (as Google lightheartedly calls them) manipulating the computer programs that rank Web pages.

The pranksters use the terms "failure" and "miserable failure" to describe and link to Mr. Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. Google is properly appalled, as it tells searchers in a blog written by Google's director of consumer Web products: "We've received a number of complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part."

Not true, according to the blog. Still, Google is "reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service." So it looks like Google won't be fixing it any time soon.

nobodys-business@sympatico.ca