Tyson Kirksey

Six months ago I posted about how the White House had apparently attempted to defuse the miserable failure google-bomb by redirecting http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html to http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/. I went into more detail at another blog explaining how the redirect was ill-advised and would probably backfire, which it did. Three days after I posted, http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/ was ranking for miserable failure, just as before. Bravo.

News today is that Google has changed it’s link analysis algorithm to detect google-bombs such as miserable failure and others in order to clarify to users that Google itself was not making opinions on certain subjects. Teary-eyed John Kerry can also now take heart, as he no longer ranks for waffles.

OK, enough with the facts, let’s get on to the speculation! Here are some possible scenarios for why this would happen now:

1. Google is feeling sympathy for Bush and his 29% approval rating, and decide the throw him a bone.
2. Google realized that after the whitehouse.gov website change last September, the bomb was going to go off on any new president as well, since the ranking page was http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/ and no longer specific to Bush’s bio. Not wanting to embarrass any of their liberal presidential hopefuls, they made the change.
3. With a presidential race upcoming, Google feared that link-bombing could get out of hand and cause even more confusion and public outcry.
4. Two Googlers decided to use their 20% time to fix this issue.

More discussion and detail at SearchEngineLand.

Tyson Politics, Search