Obama Inherits Bush 'Miserable Failure' Google-Bomb
Monday, January 26, 2009
Newly minted President Barack Obama has enough problems to tackle without a Google bomb getting thrown into the mix.
In 2003, haters of President George W. Bush with a mean streak and tech savvy managed to Google-bomb him as a "miserable failure" -- meaning that a rash of users linked Bush's name to the words "miserable failure" so that if the term was Googled, Web sites referencing him would show up higher in the search.
Even though Google eventually diffused the phenomenon in 2007 by improving the link structure surrounding the term, now Obama may be dealing with the aftermath.
According to a Search Engine Land article, Obama is inheriting all the old links from Bush's biography to the term "miserable failure" because the link to his biography was swapped for Bush's on the White House site on Inauguration Day.
As a result, a search for "miserable failure" on Yahoo will likely yield Obama's biography, and on Google, a search for "failure" will do the same.
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