[LINK] Googlebombing 'failure'

[Carl Makin]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.html

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 
<http://www.google.com/search?q=failure>] or the phrase [miserable 
failure <http://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure>], the top 
result is currently the White House’s 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 
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;c2coff=1&q=googlebombing&btnG=Search>, 
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.



-----------------------------------------


Carl.