"Miserable Failure"

Google ^ | 12/2/03 | Google

[Rebelbase]

Google the term "miserable failure" and look at the second link.

Methinks there is a liberal activist in the White House IT department.

[Rebelbase]

Ok, Web detectives get started. Is it a liberal mole in the White House messing with the website or is it someone at Google?

[Rebelbase]

ping.

[hellinahandcart]

Oh my goodness.

[Petronski]

I would think it is someone at Google. Neither 'miserable' nor 'failure' can be found on the official web page, nor in its source code.

[Damocles]

That smells a bit fishy.

That particular query returns a government site outlining W's presidency.

Yeah, I'd say someone has tied some unkind keywords to that site...

[AppyPappy]

It's not in the source. Must be Google.

[Rebelbase]

"nor in its source code."

Question: If its not in the source code then its not visible and won't show up in a search engine?

[general_re]

You have to look at the cached version that Google has for the answer, and the answer is:

"These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: miserable failure"

And here's the page that's responsible:

http://www.blah3.com/graymatter/archives/00000654.html

[palmer]

I think the domain amiserablefailure.com is causing the Google misstep. Not sure how they did it, but it looks intentional.

[palmer]

You're right, I was wrong.

[Damocles]

Only if Google attaches those particular key words to the site outside of the source, say internally at Google.

Might be worth a message to Google:

search-quality@google.com

 

[general_re]

It's somebody gaming the Google ranking system. See my previous post.

[Rebelbase]

So how did you find the original site?

[Petronski]

Excellent find.

[Damocles]

Nice catch...

[hellinahandcart]

you da man, general!

[general_re]

That blog page is the fourth link that shows up if you search for "miserable failure". Lots of people are linking to it, which makes it show up among the first results returned - the number of links pointing to your page from other pages is one of the ways Google ranks hits on your searches, and that feature is exactly what they're exploiting in order to tie "miserable failure" to GWB. They get a bunch of people to create links called "miserable failure" that point to this GWB page, and bingo - "miserable failure" now returns the GWB bio page when you search for it on Google. Eventually, if they can garner enough people doing it, "miserable failure" will return the GWB page as the first result.

[Rebelbase]

Thanks

[Prodigal Son]

It's not someone at google, it's someone who understands google.

Here's your explanation. If you look at the source code for that article in the header before the html body begins you will find the meta tags:

"keywords" content="jack beatty, bush, miserable failure, re-election, swing voters, Atlantic Unbound, Atlantic Monthly"

meta name="description" content="Jack Beatty on why Bush is a miserable failure"

The Website, The Atlantic Online is considered relevent by google's bots. The bots crawl that sight on a regular basis. Some of the things the bots look for are whether the search term appears in the meta tags of the code and if those words then appear in the document's body. If so, it considers it relevent to the search.

I've scored quite a few number one hits on google for different websites. It's not that hard if you know how to set the web pages up.

In addition, if a lot of other sites are linking to that particular article, it's relevence gets raised a great deal as well.

[boxerblues]

Using your logic we should be able to get Hillary Clinton's bio page to come up as "beast" & "witch" "anti-Christ" to name a few