Google bombing, part 1

From 2004 to 2006, if you typed in “miserable failure” on google.com, the first result you get would be George W. Bush’s official page on the White House website. This is the most popular example of a Google bomb, which manipulates search results based on the fact that Google’s page ranking algorithm places a high premium on incoming links.

According to Google, they didn’t manually edit search results for Google bombs such as these because:

We’re reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.