Google Flaw?

[lanny]

Try this. You'll find it instructive.

1- Go to www.google.com.

2- Type in "Failure", without the quote marks.

3- Instead of hitting "Search" hit "I'm feeling Lucky".

4- You'll be surprised at what comes up

5- Pass this round before the people at Google Fix it.

[Tywais]

Now that is interesting. Apparantly Google is not bi-partisan.

[The_Other_Mac]

There's no flaw, Google won't be "fixing" it, nor are they being politically biased. Ultimately, Google just reports on the common consensus.

The reason for that result is that an overwhelming number of websites mention the word "failure" while linking to that particular page.

The reason for THAT is an intentional and organised plan by a very large number of bloggers, forums and webmasters of all kinds, to create such links. It's easy. "Failure". There, Google will find this thread and I will have contributed another tiny bit to the effort.

Incidentally, the number 2 result for "failure" is MichaelMoore.com. I'd assume that this is a result of a "retaliation" by right-wing webmasters. However it appears that on the internet, there are more Bush opponents than supporters. Considering that Bush is globally disliked but only locally supported, this isn't surprising. In any case, it's recognised that the internet has a left-wing/liberal bias in general. Presumably this reflects a tendency of "early adopters" of new technology to also be early adopters of new political ideas.

Notice the advert to the right of the main Google results, this is from Google themselves and explains the apparent political bias in the results.

There, that really killed the joke, didn't it?

[wolf5370]

From Google

Googlebombing 'failure'

9/16/2005 12:54:00 PM

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products

If you do a Google search on the word [failure]or the phrase [miserable 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.

Read It Here

Funny though, never the less. Thereused to be some 'Easter Eggs' hidden in MS Office spellcheck for Bill Gates (various spelling gave various results) - but this was removed with patches later.

[LivinLOS]

Try the googlebomb "french military victories"

Now thats funny !!!