George W Bush a `failure' according to Google search!

BANGALORE: The growing American disenchantment with US President George Bush seems to have affected Internet search leader Google as well, it would seem. Just key in failure and click on the “I'm feeling lucky” button and the search leads you straight to the White House website, that too, to the Bush's profile page.

This search event has led to a lot of netizens complaining to Google about political bias on the company's part. Behind this act are hyperactive pranksters indulging in what is called Google-bombing.

In September, a senior Google executive tried to soothe frayed tempers by clarifying that the company was not at fault. “We don't condone the practice of Google-bombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also 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,” said Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products, Google.

Google's PageRank algorithm is built in such a way that a page is ranked higher if all the sites linking to that page use consistent anchor text. Google-bombers use this strategy to manipulate links to a certain page.

Bush is not the only victim of such a prank. He has the world's richest man- Microsoft CEO Bill Gates for company. As early as 1999, the search for “More evil than Satan” led to the Microsoft website. However Gates is lucky since this cyber trick no longer works.