Google bombing, part 2

So how was the George W. Bush “miserable failure” bomb finally removed from Google search results?

There are two reasons: first, in 2007, Google changed their algorithm so that it could no longer be abused by pranksters, and ensured that the “miserable failure” search term would not point to the Google bomb, but rather to discussions, news articles, and commentary about the Google bomb project. The first result is now an article about the “miserable failure” Google bomb itself. Google’s official statement on this change was:

Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

Also, the White House web team got smart and redirected the link that used to point to George W. Bush’s biography; it now points to the page of the current president, which means that after Bush’s successor is elected, those old links would now point to that person’s page. On second thought, I’m not sure that was a completely smart thing to do.