This day in search marketing history: January 25

Google defuses ‘miserable failure’ Google bomb

In 2007, Google finally defused a “Google Bomb” that had returned U.S. President George W. Bush as its top organic result since December 2003 when searching for [miserable failure].

Originally, Google was of the belief that “We just reflect the opinion on the Web, for better or worse.” Eventually, however, Google came up with an algorithm change to deal with this and other Google bombing “pranks”:

“People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.”

Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini, A quick word about Googlebombs

How did this Google bomb happen? A campaign encouraged people to link to Bush’s bio using the anchor text “Miserable Failure”.

And while Google defused this bomb, Bush remained in the top organic position for [miserable failure] on Yahoo and Microsoft Live and in second position at Ask.

Read all about it in Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs and Happy First Birthday, Google Bomb Fix!

Here was the before and after at the time:

Today, here’s what a search for [miserable failure] looks like on Google – with Wikipedia’s Google bombing page in the top spot.

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