Ok this is to explain about my previous post titled Who’s a failure according to google. One of the comments (thanks retard - u no retard lah) was a link to an old news from BBC published in 2003 which reported this incident.

This is not some kind of error on Google’s part but a sort of hooligan-type, “community project” because it involved a lot of people and websites to make this happen.

Let me explain bit by bit for the newbies.

In [tag]Google[/tag], when you click the button “I’m feeling lucky”, you will be taken to the page located at the top of the results, means you trust that google knows what you want and you don’t want to look at all the other results, you just want to go to the page ranked first in the search results.

So how does Google decides who gets to the top of the page?

One of the biggest factor is what they call Page Ranking, where each page has their own ‘popularity’ on the internet by counting on how many websites link to you. They figure, if there are thousands of people link from their websites to yours, then your website must be important. More links to your website, the higher the ranking.

So, using this knowledge, a group of people was determined to push George Bush’s page to the top of the ranking when people searched for ‘failure’. They promoted this idea and asked webmasters to up somewhere on their own website, a short description on failure and link that word to Bush’s page. They spread their propaganda through websites, blogs and IRC rooms.

This is what they call a [tag]googlebomb[/tag] and I think thousands of websites joined in (especially those who are not in favour of Bush’s agenda on war). So that was why when you search for ‘failure’ or ‘miserable failure’ and click on ‘I’m feeling lucky’, you are taken to Bush’s page.

Other googlebomb :

“miserabile fallimento” which means miserable failure in italian, will give you the website of Silvio Berlusconi (Italian Prime Minister).

“anti-war peace protesters” will return a fake error, saying you are looking for “anti-war violent protesters”.

Links :
2003 BBC Report
Feedback by Google on the “failure” googlebomb.
Wikipedia (free encyclopedia) on Googlebomb

[tags]George Bush, Page Ranking[/tags]