Hokay

Everyone -- including my dear own crack-addled Mom -- is sending the tip that if you type "failure" into a Google search it comes up with the top search result of George W. Bush.

This has been the case for years. Actually, the previous term that brought it up was "miserable failure," but now I guess they've succeeded in getting it to the point where just "failure" does the trick.

Snopes explains this is "Google-bombing." Basically lefties deliberately search for the world "failure" all day long, then choose George Bush on the list of search items found. Google's software "learns" that these two terms are "related," and as these idiots keep furiously clicking instead of, you know, working at a job or at least watching porn, the association between "George Bush" and "failure" becomes stronger in the Google search software until it eventually gets to the top of the list.

We could do this too. We could search for "drunken bear-thing" and then click on the result "John Kerry" result (which, coincidentally, just happens to be on my site). If we did this enough, Google would "learn" that John Kerry is a drunken bear-thing.

But we have better things to do, like work, and porn.

So: I'm posting this because people keep sending it. It's pretty old, and it's not really Google's fault.

Except, I guess, if we did make John Kerry the number one search term for "Drunken Bear-Thing" or "Shaved Bigfoot," Google would actually intervene and change its software to prevent this association. Which of course they won't do with Bush and failure.

As Google says:

Craig Silverstein, Google's director for technology, says the company sees nothing wrong with the public using its search engine this way. No user is hurt, he said, because there is no clearly legitimate site for "miserable failure" being pushed aside.

Moreover, he said, Google's results were taking stock of the range of opinions that are expressed online. "We just reflect the opinion on the Web,'' he said, "for better or worse."

Again, I have a feeling that they'd be more bothered if Hillary Clinton became the top search term for "cankled whore."

posted by Ace at 03:15 PM

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