Pratap Ravindran

Pune, Nov. 5

IF you are one among those who hold that Google is, by far, the best search engine around and you coincidentally believe that the US presidency of Mr George W. Bush is an unmitigated disaster for just about everybody on this planet, you might want to check this out.

Go to the Google home page, enter "failure" or, if you're feeling particularly mean, "miserable failure," (but without the inverted quotes) as the search term/phrase and then hit the `I'm Feeling Lucky' key - not the `Search' key.

You'll find yourself at >http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html which is the page in the official White House Web site featuring Mr Bush's biography and will be able to amuse yourself hugely reading about how the US President has worked with Congress to create an "ownership society and build a future of security, prosperity, and opportunity for all Americans" and about his conviction that the "strength of America lies in the hearts and souls of its citizens" - as against the country's military might, presumably.

The interesting thing about this instance of "cyber-graffiti," as The New York Times dubbed it, is not that it is there - but that it has been there since late 2003.

Some insight into its persistence is afforded by the September 16 posting by Ms Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products of Google, on the official Google blog site: "If you do a Google search on the word `failure' or the phrase `miserable failure,' the top result is currently the White House's official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns."

"Google's search results are generated by computer programmes that rank Web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called Google-bombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases `failure' and `miserable failure' to describe and link to President Bush's Web site, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of Google-bombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

People take up Google-bombing for a variety of reasons.

By way of illustration, the linking of "miserable failure" with the current occupant of the White House has its origins in a programmer, Mr George Johnston's dislike for the policies of Mr Bush. Mr Johnston, as it happened, had been struck by a Google bomb that threw up a Web page made to look like a Microsoft error message in response to a search for "weapons of mass destruction." He decided to express his antipathy to Mr Bush's policies by creating a Google bomb tying the US President's official biography to the phrase "miserable failure," watchwords of the presidential campaign of Mr Richard A. Gephardt.

In October 2003, Mr Johnston created links on his blog (oldfashionedpatriot.blogspot.com), tying the phrase to the Bush biography.

He sent messages to other anti-Bush bloggers, informing them of his project. Many of them added the phrase to their own sites - and urged their readers to follow suit.

And so, Mr Bush was well and truly google-bombed.

Mr Craig Silverstein, Google's director for technology, was quoted by Mr Saul Hansell of The New York Times (Foes of Bush Enlist Google to Make Point/December 8, 2003) as saying that the company did not see anything wrong in the public using its search engine this way. "No user is hurt because there is no clearly legitimate site for `miserable failure' being pushed aside."

Mr Silverstein went on to point out that Google's results were taking stock of the range of the opinions that are expressed online. "We just reflect the opinion on the Web, for better or worse."

Google's PageRank algorithm works in such a way that a page is ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created when a large number of sites link to the page in this manner.

Google-bombing, incidentally, is quite different from spamdexing, which involves a dishonest attempt to modify HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed higher up in search engine results or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.

According to some Web chroniclers, the first Google bomb was made perhaps accidentally in 1999 when Google users discovered that the query "more evil than Satan" returned Microsoft's home page.

Can Mr Bush hope for relief at some point of time from being google-bombed? He can. Ironically, Google bombs, like politicians, usually stop working when they become very popular. They are written up extensively in the media - and consequently get knocked off the pedestal.