Go to Google.com. Type 'Failure' and press 'I'm feeling Lucky'. Why do you get the result you do? Seriously?

Question

No rhetoric, alright? Give me a logical explanation.

Answer 1

This is a result of what's been defined as a "google bomb". I've offered a detailed explanation below for you.

A Google bomb or Googlewash is a certain attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Due to the way that Google's PageRank algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun.

See spamdexing for the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a misleading or dishonest manner.

Background

An example of Google bombing is if a user registers many domains and all of them link to a main site with the text "... is a living legend". Searching for "living legend" on Google will return the main site higher in the ranking, even if the phrase "living legend" doesn't appear on the main site. A common means of exploiting this is through weblogs, where although the entry may disappear from the main page quickly, the short-term effects of a link can dramatically affect the ranking of a given site. Empirical results indicate that it does not take a large number of websites to achieve a Google bomb. The effect has been achieved with only a handful of dedicated weblogs.

The above has to be qualified, however. A handful of blog links will not Google bomb someone like Amazon.com out of the top results for "books," for example. In fact, Google bombs have generally had an impact on relatively "non-competitive" terms, where there's no particular page that seems to be necessarily the right answer.

The technique was first discussed on April 6, 2001 in an article by Adam Mathes [1]. In that article, he coined the term "Google bombing" and explained how he discovered that Google used the technique to calculate page rankings. He found that a search for "internet rockstar" returned the website of a Ben Brown as the first result, even though "internet rockstar" did not appear anywhere on Brown's webpage. He reasoned that Google's algorithm returned it as the first result because many fan sites that linked to Brown's website used that phrase on their own pages.

Mathes began testing his theory by setting out to make the website of his friend Andy Pressman the number one result for a query of "talentless hack". He gave instructions for creating websites and links to Pressman's website with the text of the link reading "talentless hack". Sure enough, as other webloggers joined in his Google bombing campaign, Pressman's website became the number one result in a Google search for "talentless hack." (By 2004, Mathes's own site was the number one Google result of this search term.)

However, the first Google bomb mentioned in the popular press may have occurred accidentally in 1999, when users discovered that the query "more evil than Satan" returned Microsoft's home page. Now, it returns links to several news articles on the discovery.

Google bombs often end their life by being too popular or well known, thereby attaining a mention in well-regarded web journals and knocking the bomb off the top spot. It is sometimes commented that Google bombing need not be countered because of this self-disassembly.

In addition, the entire notion of "Google bombs" might be better described as "link bombing," given that these campaigns can certainly have an effect on other search engines, as well. All major search engines make use of link analysis and thus can be impacted. So, a search for "miserable failure" on June 1, 2005 brought up the official George W. Bush biography number one on Google, Yahoo! and MSN and number two on Ask Jeeves. On June 2, 2005, Yooter reported that George Bush is now ranked first for the keyword 'failure' as well as 'miserable failure' in both Google and Yahoo!. And on September 16, 2005, Marissa Mayer wrote on Google Blog about the practice of Google bombing and the word "failure." (See Google's response below.) Other large political figures have been targeted for Google bombs such as, Yooter reported on January 6, 2006, Tony Blair is now indexed in the US & UK versions of Google for the keyword 'liar'.

The BBC in reporting on Google bombs in 2002 actually used the headline of "Google Hit By Link Bombers," acknowledging to some degree the idea of "link bombing." In 2004, the Search Engine Watch site said that the term should be "link bombing" because of the impact beyond Google and continues to use that term as more accurate.

Nevertheless, "Google bombing" was added to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005.

A Google bomb could be achieved easily; this is a possible scenario:

1. The initiator chooses a word to be searched : "liar".
2. The initiator chooses the target website : "http://example.com/".
3. The initiator creates a link like this : liar.
4. The initiator places this code in his website, in his signature on forums, in his blogs, etc.
5. The initiator talks to other people about the bomb and tells other people to use the code in their own writings.
6. GoogleBot indexes and ranks, resulting in http://google.com/search?q=liar having the victim's webpage as the first result.

Answer 2

Very simple actually...

Google's search algorithm returns results based on the number of hits to a website...in other words, the more times a site is clicked on when the search term is "Failure", the higher it will appear on Google's sites returned list...so, we the people can actually affect how Google returns results...get enough people to search for a term and go to the same, predetermined, website and that site will become Google's number 1 result for that term...then pressing "I'm Feeling Lucky" will take you directly to that site (that's what it does, takes you to Google's #1 automatically)...some genius got people to do this for "Failure" and GWB...

Awesome...huh?

Answer 3

Well, when you click on I'm feeling lucky it takes you to the first page in the search. I guess somewhere in that website, it has the word failure, or maybe someone rigged it that way(it sounds silly but you never know). That's very interesting though.

Answer 4

That means, based on google's architecture, that A LOT of people that were looking for "failure" went directly to Chimp's bio. Whether purposely or not, it's hilarious!

Answer 5

because the folks are Google have a sense of humor.

There are a lot of other quirky things you can type in google and get humorous results like that.

Answer 6

Haha...that's awesome! Well, it's probably because it's true...his presidency has basically been one big failure.

Answer 7

because nazi Bush is the biggest failure in history

Answer 8

LOL Thats is freakin funny !!


lol
lol
lol

Answer 9

because googe only speaks the truth

Answer 10

That's stupid.