[MineralMan]

Only those who have read the 5000 previous posts on this subject.

[BibChr]

There's a guy on TV.

Right now!

Talking!

Anyone see this????

[Vive ut Vivas]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

[BulletBobCo]

Google the word "waffles".

[BenLurkin]

[pa mom]

Do a thread search. I think it's explained pretty well on some.

[dirtboy]

Liberals manipulating the web is how it happens.

So they are all congratulating themselves over this stunning political act. Meanwhile, we've got Dan Rather's scalp.

[Shalom Israel]

Old news. It's called a "google bomb": people create tons of links to a particular page, for example by putting links in blog comments all over the blogosphere. That raises the "page rank", until the target page becomes the #1 hit. The same trick was used for "french military victories".

[Danae]

It's called Google Bombing and it has been going on for a while. Some schmuck makes a website that redirects your query to some other page. It is actually becoming pretty common, though Google refuses to stop it. They say they are just a window on the Internet and they are more or less right. It isn't their fault, but they will nix really obnoxious stuff.

[Brilliant]

The word "failure" doesn't even appear in that bio of GW Bush. The question is not "why does this happen," but rather what is Google doing about this?

[TheBigB]

Hey, there's an awesome email I just got titled "I am a BAD American!" Did you get it too? Post that!

[lonestar67]

Google's explanation:

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 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, 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.

[Corin Stormhands]

How does this happen?

Usually it gets bumped to the to by people posting vanity threads about it...

[Rocky]

Well, it was gratifying to see that Michael Moore came up as number 3 on the list.

[Rebelbase]

You been sleeping for a couple of years?

[R. Scott]

It's still one of the better search engines.

[Bear_Slayer]

Official Google Explanation

[softwarecreator]

Is it Monday already?  Time for the Google "failure" reference.

[Hatteras]

Did you hear? Hannity has a book out!

[So Cal Rocket]

Same way this happens... go to Google Images and type in:

Democratic Seal