Google Search for Failure
Filed under Tech Trends.
A friend just pointed this out to me. I have no idea how things like this get discovered but it’s hilarious. I wasn’t sure how long this would work so I grabbed a screen capture of the page. This is an actual screen shot. Nothing was edited. If you go to Google and search on just the word failure, the first search result is a link to the “Biography of President George W. Bush”.
The interesting (and funny) thing about this is that the referenced page doesn’t even have the word failure anywhere in the content. I do a lot of search engine optimization and there is no way that page can be first without some insider help. So I guess we know which side the techs at Google are on. I can’t see this staying in their index very long, as Google probably hates this type of publicity. SEOs are going to have a fit because clearly this proves that Google is stuffing their search engine rankings. It’s also not someone paying for the top spot through an Adwords pay-per-click campaign either. Even if it is a joke, it shows that the tech people behind the scenes are putting whatever keywords they want at the top. (click on image for larger version).
Now THAT is funny!
Technorati Tags: Google, President+Bush, Bush, failure, Google+search, biography, keywords, President
On July 5th, 2005 at 7:39 am
Sorry, JPatrickm, but on this one you’ve really completely got the wrong end of the stick.
I quote:
“I do a lot of search engine optimization and there is no way that page can be first without some insider help.”
Wow, slow down!
It’s quite the opposite: the page got to the top with outsider help, not insider help!
The technique is known as a “Google bomb” and simply consists of a large group of pranksters linking to that page using “failure” or “miserable failure” in the text anchor of the link. That is then interpreted by Google’s incredibly smart but also incredibly dumb algorithm as a sign of relevance of that page for that word.
Combine this with the fact that page has very high Page Rank and there’s your explanation for the top position.
Read more on Google bombs here: http://developing-your-web-presence.blogspot.com/2005/03/google-bomb.html. There are many such pranks to be found if you look for them.
Have a nice day!