Go ahead. Do it. A Google search on the phrase “Miserable Failure.”
Once upon a time, the phrase “Miserable Failure” would have brought up this page, the official White House biography of President George W. Bush.
But no more.
Google has done away with Googlebombs, the technique of linking to a page by using a very different phrase in order to “game” Google’s search results. “Miserable failure” was one such phrase–hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, myself included, wrote the phrase “miserable failure” and embedded a hyperlink back to Bush’s biography. Google, in their trawl of the Internet, saw that the phrase “miserable failure” meant Bush, and their search results reflected that fact.
A real shame.
But just because Google won’t pull up Bush’s biography with a search of the phrase “miserable failure” doesn’t make the fact that Bush is a miserable failure as a President and as a human being any less true.
Thanks to Alden Bates for linking to the Google article. 🙂
And “Santorum” shall always mean “that frothy mix of lube and fecal matter which sometimes results from anal sex.”
They can’t take that away from me.
That’s still the first result in a Google search on the term “Santorum.”
I don’t know how Google’s page-rank stats work, but I think it would be a bit more difficult to scrub “santorum” of its Googlebombed meaning. The word “santorum” is part of the URL, the word “santorum” is used on the page. The words “miserable failure” never appeared in Bush’s White House bio–they were simply a random term people appropriated to describe the President.