Miserable Failure
Miserable failure was a term applied to the
administration of U.S. President George W. Bush by Dick Gephardt. Later,
George W. Bush's biography page appeared as the #1 Google hit for that
specific search query . More recently, images of Bush now appear at the
top of the search page as Google Image results and searching for the
word "failure" by itself brings up his bio.
The Google Page that shows the results of miserable failure.
The trick is possible because Google searches more than just the contents
of web pages - it also counts how often a site is linked to, and with what
words. When such a tactic is taken to a large scale, as in this case, it is
called Googlebombing. The blog Old Fashioned Patriot claims to be the origin
of this particular Google bomb.
Google has commented that it will not hand alter the result (or any other
googlebombed results) because it wished to preserve the integrity of its
search engine.
In retaliation, Bush supporters Google-bombed Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton,
and Michael Moore with the same phrase. Some people have misinterpreted
Michael Moore's listing as meaning that Moore was the originator of the
Googlebombing rather than a fellow recipient. Though Moore was not the
originator, he has used these words to describe Bush on his site .
Furthermore, there was a time when clicking on the Michael Moore webpage
from the Google "miserable failure" search results would redirect the user
to the biography of President Bush. As of November 2005, the user is
redirected to a page with a photomosaic of President Bush made up of photos
of fallen U.S. soldiers.
In September 2005, the following ad appeared with the search results
to explain the situation:
Why these results?
These results may seem politically
slanted. Here's what happened.
www.google.com/googleblog
Some of Google's newer features, Local and
Maps, also provide "miserable failure" results in Washington DC.
On an interesting note, typing "miserable failure" into other various
popular search engines yields similar results:
It should also be noted that the sixth item listed on the Google page (as
of December 26, 2005) is this page, while most other items retrieved are
news articles documenting the Googlebombing.
Of course the term miserable failure has earlier antecedents. For example,
it was used in the 1970s by the BBC to describe American intervention in
Vietnam, and by the New York Times to describe certain architectural
monstrosities. AFLCIO president George Meaney used the term to describe the
Nixon Administration's wage and price controls. Critics of the Googlebombing
pointed out that these and other legitimate historical instances became
buried beneath what they referred to as Web graffiti.
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