Google bomb

The first Google bomb occurred in 1999. While the creators remain anonymous, the existence of the bomb was revealed when pjammer, a user on memepool.com, posted a question that asked what Google found to be "more evil than satan himself." Users searching Google for the term found Microsoft's home page as the first link in the search results. The term itself was coined by Adam Mathes in 2001, when he wrote an article about how he bombed the term "talentless hack" to play a joke on a friend, graphic designer Andy Pressman.

One of the most famous Google bombs occured in 2004, when U.S. President George W. Bush was up for re-election. To experience this particular Google bomb, try searching for "miserable failure" on Google. The first return will be a link to the biography of George W. Bush on the official White House Web site. In order for the bomb to work, a large number of Web pages had to link to the White House biography page with the authors using the exact words "miserable failure" in their hyperlink descriptions.

Read more about Google bomb: - Googlebomb Watch on Google Blogoscoped keeps tabs on current and past Google bombs. - Clifford Tatum deconstructs two Google bombs on FirstMonday.com. - Danny Sullivan explains why he doesn't find Google bombs very scary in this SearchEngineWatch article. - This New York Times article explains more about Google bombing. (Registration required).

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