Old Web Prank Links ‘Obama’ With ‘Failure’

By Miguel Helft
New York Times

A five-year-old online prank that mocked President Bush is now aiming its snarkiness at Barack Obama.

Search for “failure” on Google or “miserable failure” on Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s search engines, and the top result you’ll get is likely to be a link to a biography of President Obama on the official Whitehouse.gov Web site. Before the inauguration, those searches linked to a biography of President Bush.

Search engine experts said Mr. Obama is now the butt of the online joke because his Web team failed to clean up a jumble of links left behind by Mr. Bush’s crew. The White House press office did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

The prank began in 2003, when a blogger angry at Mr. Bush encouraged his readers to link the words “miserable failure” on their own Web sites to Mr. Bush’s official biography on the Web. Google interprets incoming links on the Web as votes that establish the popularity of a page and its relevancy to a certain query. The prank worked, as Google began interpreting searches for “miserable failure” as requests to see the official biography of George W. Bush.

Although techies call this kind of prank a “Google bomb,” it tends to work on other search engines like Yahoo and Microsoft, because they use a similar method to rank pages.

Google attempted to neuter the prank in 2007 but was only partly successful. Earlier, the Bush White House tried as well, but its efforts were clumsy. It moved Mr. Bush’s biography to newly created page. But it also “redirected” requests for the page that hosted the old Bush biography to a page typically used by the office of the president, not a single president. As a result, searches for “miserable failure” pointed to that page.

Danny Sullivan, a search expert who has followed the prank since its inception, used his blog, Search Engine Land, earlier this month to urge Mr. Bush to fix the problem before he left office. He also wrote detailed instructions for how to do so. Mr. Bush’s team did nothing. And in building the new Whitehouse.gov site, the Obama team appears to have, in essence, mirrored the Bush-era redirection snafu, which now sends users to a biography of the current office holder.

“When it comes to search engine stuff, they haven’t demonstrated that they are on top of it,” Mr. Sullivan said in an interview. “This is a stumble.” Sphere: Related Content