During the presidential election of the United States in 2004, Google bombs were used to further various political agendas. Two of the first were the "miserable failure" Google bomb linked to George W. Bush's White House biography and the "waffles" Google bomb linked to John Kerry's website.
Supporters and detractors of the candidates were able to manipulate search engine rankings so that searches for "miserable failure" and "waffles" returned links to the targets' sites.[1] In 2006, Google altered its searching algorithm to make massive link farms less effective, making search results less politically slanted.[2]
In January 2009, President Barack Obama's official White House web site also appeared on the first few results for "miserable failure" on Live Search and Yahoo, and on the first page of results for the word "failure" on Google. The cause of this is disputed, with some claiming it to be the result of a similar campaign.[3]
Others believe it to be a result of URL redirection from the old White House site (under President Bush) to the site for President Barack Obama. Because the HTTP 301 redirect indicates that the old page is permanently replaced by the new one, it also inherits all links to it and therefore the ranking for the same keywords.[4]
- ^ Dropping Google Bombs, Sidener, Jonathan June 14, 2004 accessed August 9, 2006
- ^ "A quick word about Googlebombs".
- ^ "Unlike Bush's 'Google Bomb,' Google Quickly Defuses Obama's". Fox News. 2009-01-30.
- ^ Bush: Fix Your "Miserable Failure" Googlebomb Legacy Before Obama Takes Office. Searchengineland.com (2009-01-07). Retrieved on 2014-05-29.