Rest in peace, miserable failure

Source.

Up until late last month, you could search for "miserable failure" on Google and turn up the White House's official page on Bush as the first result. This is thanks to a practice called Google bombing.

But now the bomb's a dud.

The New York Times reported on the 29th of last month:

Now a favored online tactic to mock the president — altering the Google search engine so the words “miserable failure” lead to President Bush’s home page at the White House — has been neutralized.

Google announced on Thursday on its official blog that “by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web” such mischief would instead “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself.

Indeed, a search on Saturday of “miserable failure” on Google leads to a now-outdated BBC News article from 2003 about the “miserable failure” search, rather than the previous first result, President Bush’s portal at whitehouse.gov/president.

Well, it was fun while it lasted, I suppose.

But one thing I don't understand is what Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, said about the matter:

Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.

What? Why would people think such a thing? That makes as much sense as claiming that the media has an overt liberal bias. But then, a lot of people seem to believe it does, so who knows.

Another thing I don't understand is this:

Despite the changes by Google, some other Google bombs are still operative. A search for “French military victories” still produces a first result that says, “Your search — French military victories — did not match any documents.” Click there and your find a mockup of a Google search page asking the question “Did you mean: French military defeats.”

So not only did they accommodate themselves for people who don't take the time to think things through, but they also were inconsistent in neutralizing Google bombs?

George Johnston, the organizer of the "miserable failure" bomb, said that he:

considered Google’s decision politically motivated, even if was not done by hand, and noted that the company had agreed to censor results in China. “I believe them that they tweaked the algorithm, but it is such weasel words,” he said. “The fact that some Google bombs still work makes me think they have a blacklist essentially of ways of tweaking results.”

He hasn’t given up the fight, he said, and remains unhappy with Google’s tweak. “They say they fixed it. I think they broke it,” he said.

I can see his point of view. However, I think I'll personally be able to live without this particular Google bomb. Google's efforts may have been at best annoyingly haphazard, but right now there are more important things to worry about.