Google Search For Failure Pulls Up An Interesting Result
A friend of mine told me to type failure into the Google search box to see what the result was. I was thinking that the result could be one of many things, but the first result was absolutely shocking.
The second result in the search is Failure Magazine and the third result is the Wikipedia entry for failure, both of which make sense. The first result, however, doesn’t even have the word “failure” anywhere on the site.
The only reason that I can think of why it is the first result is that many people probably hyperlink to that page and use the word “failure” from within that hyperlink. Some search engines, like Google, use words in a hyperlink as a descriptor for the site that is being hyperlinked. For example, if you hyperlink to our site like this:
then Google will bump us up a little in the search results for anyone searching for “Technology News”…of course that is just speculation on how it works but it seems to be logical. That is why they recommend that you use keywords when creating a hyperlink instead of the classic “click here” hyperlink.
At any rate, hope you got your laugh for the day.
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Tags: Google
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This has been around for a long time.
There is some more information on how it works.
They used Googlebombing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebombing). My opinion is that if they don’t have a better way to argue against Bush, then they’re out of arguments.
Link didn’t work in my first post.
thanks for the laugh.
There was also a funny search similar to that awhile ago. You would type in “french victories” and Google would come up with a suggestion that said “Did you mean french military defeats“? But they fixed it now.
When I went to check out the results, there was a sponsored link to the Google blog at the top, where an article explains that the reasons for the result appearing as it does are exactly as you state in your piece here. What I find interesting is that the date of the post on the Google blog is over a year ago, so this has obviously been the state of play for some time…
Yeh, I was about to suggest Google Bombing when I read this in Google Reader but alas others have commented before me. Regardless I first found out about this at least half a year ago so it isn’t new (unlucky Ryan) but it’s still good to bring it to the greater community, seeing as how many hits you’ve got.
On that note, did I ever mention 1keNet
That French military thing was on a Google parody site, not actually on Google itself.
@Max
I remember that French victories search from a while back, that’s always a classic.
The Wikipedia entry on this (as stated above by onlineapps):
Here’s further explanation of these results on the Google blog and reference to another:
Also one day several years ago, I happened to come upon synonyms for Bush (& Bush League) on dictionary.com which brings up a few interesting results; amateur, among several others that seemed rather appropriate:
Wow, didn’t know it had been around that long.
What’s even more surprising is that I hadn’t heard of the phrase “Google Bombing” before. I learn something new everyday!
It’s no mystery how it got there, Google is a very liberal organization and decided to modify the search to get a few cheap kicks:evil:
PROOF: The word “failure” is not mentioned in the site title or anywhere in the entire website (just hit Ctrl F and type “failure”);)
A friend showed me this about a year ago, I wouldn’t be surprised if this has been up since a year or so after GW’s initial election
Now search liar and click I’m feeling lucky
Hey, it also works when you type “failure” in Firefox 2.0 Location Bar!!!
:D 
:D 
:D 
:D 
:D
It will get you directly to G.Bush website!!!
Actually, my friend, if you read the Googleblog post that a few of the other commenters have already linked to, you’ll see that the results work that way because countless bloggers and webmasters the world over have linked to that site using the word ‘failure‘ in the link text (ooops, I done gone did it again) which, due to the way their algorithms process the web, associates that word with that website. Rather than some ‘liberal conspiracy’, this is a form of true (and global) democracy in action - if you think about it.