Writing on the Google blog, Matt Cutts, the head of the Google’s Webspam team, said that Google bombs had not “been a very high priority for us.” But he added: “Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.”

Mr. Cutts was not available on Friday to expand on his blog, a Google spokeswoman said. A White House spokesman had no comment on the issue.

Despite the changes by Google, some other Google bombs are still operative. A search for “French military victories” still produces a first result that says, “Your search — French military victories — did not match any documents.” Click there and your find a mockup of a Google search page asking the question “Did you mean: French military defeats.”

The organizer of the “miserable failure” Google bomb was George Johnston, a political activist and software programmer in Bellevue, Wash.

What began as a prank become something more after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Johnston said. In September 2005, he said he noticed a renewed interest in the “miserable failure” prank; he believes “people were in shock over New Orleans” and began typing “failure” into their searches. Mr. Johnston said he considered Google’s decision politically motivated, even if was not done by hand, and noted that the company had agreed to censor results in China. “I believe them that they tweaked the algorithm, but it is such weasel words,” he said. “The fact that some Google bombs still work makes me think they have a blacklist essentially of ways of tweaking results.”