Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Failure


If you google failure or miserable failure, the first link you get (at least as of now) is to the biography of George W. Bush at the White House site.

Googlebolg informs its readers that this strange (or, not so strange, according to some ;-) search result is due to a kind of cooperative prank called 'google bombing', in which "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".

Two questions: should Google do something about it? (After all, it does have the capability to manually override the decisions made by its program). Also, does the fact that it is not doing anything at all (for well over two days, now) say something about Google, and if so, what is it?

2 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    Actually it's been this way for more than 2 days. In fact, it's been this way for probably a number of months, if not a year. I wonder why they have only addressed this issue on their blog now.

  2. Abi said...

    Hi Gawker,

    Point taken. However, do you think Google would be indulging in public hand-wringing if they had a similar episode, say, with the dictatorial leader of a large country (wink, wink)and repression?