Googlebombing ‘failure’
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of
Consumer Web Products
If you do a Google search on the word [
phrase [
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.
Tags: , Consumer, Director, Marissa, Mayer, Posted, ProductsIf, Web