Fergie's Tech Blog

Google Won't Remove "Failure" Link To Bush

Google says it won't manually manipulate its search results, even when pranksters push unwarranted links to the top of the results list with so-called "googlebombing" tactics.

The most recent embarrassment for Google? Type "failure" into the Google search field. The number one result: President George W. Bush's official bio hosted by the White House Web site. "We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part," wrote Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer products on the company's blog. "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."

posted by Fergie @ 9/19/2005 11:52:00 AM