Comments on: Failure

By: Clifford

Clifford — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:48:19 +0000

Brilliant! I’d forgotten about that one! I especially love the part about “If you are an Old European Country….”

Thanks!

-cvj

By: Lauren Schenkman

Lauren Schenkman — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:18:50 +0000

Anyone remember when Googling "weapons of mass destruction" gave that pseudo internet explorer page? That was a fun one circulating around the dorms a few years ago. I found it again, thanks to wikipedia: weapons of mass destruction

By: someguy

someguy — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:01:00 +0000

zing! aren’t we clever! It’s funny cause George W. is a failure! oh my, this is comedy. Let’s give ourselves a collective pat on the back.

By: Jenn

Jenn — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 03:23:05 +0000

oh, hilarious! thx – after a long day, I needed the laugh!

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:44:41 +0000

Amazing – this is a white house DOT gov website.

Sadly, note the two listed universities – Yale and Harvard.

By: Clifford

Clifford — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 18:23:17 +0000

Thanks for all the links guys…. I had no idea that this was going on…it’s both interesting and hilarious.

(And it makes not one bit of difference whether it is “new” or not, you clever so-ahead-of-the-curve commenters. I don’t think there’s anything about being a “breaking news” service in our about page. It was new to me and I thought I’d share it with others who did not know about it.)

Cheers,
-cvj

By: Chris W.

Chris W. — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:12:07 +0000

This just in: Google has just introduced its BlogSearch beta site. Check out the FAQ. (I haven't tried using it to search for "failure".)

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:45:21 +0000

Wow, nothing gets by you scientists…

By: Gante

Gante — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 09:35:51 +0000

Yeah there have been many fine Google hours (which is no doubt why they leave the system as it is – it makes them look edgey and cool). being English, my favourite is on google.co.uk, type in liar:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=liar&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

By: Samuel Crane

Samuel Crane — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 06:36:09 +0000

‘Miserable failure’ links to Bush
BBC: 7 December, 2003

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3298443.stm

By: Will

Will — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 04:03:18 +0000

You can do this with a number of phrases…just of the top of my head “worst president ever” turns it up as well. cute indeed.

By: Bjorn

Bjorn — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 02:36:36 +0000

Risa, you are right. I told this story to a friend, who responded along the same lines as your comment, which I just read. I was not aware that “miserable failure” has been so popular as a link to the biography in the past. So I start to believe that this is a collaborative effect rather than the making of a single person. But it was such a compassionate idea…

By: Clifford

Clifford — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 02:28:04 +0000

Oh, so I was supposed to link the words failure or miserable failure ? I see….

-cvj

By: Jacques Distler

Jacques Distler — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 02:24:02 +0000

That he's a miserable failure? Didn't we already know that? "We'll stand down when the voters stand up." is my motto.

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:07:12 +0000

The first googlebomb was ‘talentless hack’, I think, and it was done as an experiment and as a joke. Surprised that google haven’t reformed their ordering procedures to stop it.

As I understand it, all you need to do is get a lot of bloggers to link to a particular page using the phrase in question (the phrase doesn’t have to be in the page). ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ was another one, if I recall right.

By: Risa

Risa — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 23:11:51 +0000

This isn’t new, it started a few years ago. The specific targetted phrase was “miserable failure”, but I’m sure it was just that this was sucessful enough that failure now gets it too. Bjorn, as you’ll see from the wikipedia article, it’s not the search community, it’s random people linking that phrase to that page in their websites or blogs.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 23:03:52 +0000

Hehe. Funny. Try do a “French Military Victories” search in google too. I wonder if it is the same guy behind this one.

Google generally doesn’t stop parody pages like this so I doubt it’ll go down.

By: Moshe Rozali

Moshe Rozali — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 22:51:33 +0000

OK, got it, I was confused by the fact that google seems to be down.

The scheme is clever, I found out how it is done by (what else?) googling “google failure”. It is supposed to work best with the expression “miserable failure”, actually.

Now back to my regularly scheduled errands…

By: Tim D

Tim D — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 22:51:20 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

By: Bjorn

Bjorn — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 22:45:04 +0000

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the W biography does not contain the word “failure”, or at least my browser couldn’t find it. I believe somebody in the search engine community gets his frustration out this way. Subtle, but clever.