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Unlike Bush's 'Google Bomb,' Google Quickly Defuses Obama's Friday, January 30, 2009 By Joshua Rhett Miller A Google search of 'miserable failure' now returns Web sites about the Googlebombs rather than the original pages that were returned. It took four years for Google to address the "Google bomb" that was lobbed at former President Bush. But it took the Internet behemoth only a few days to defuse the same attack on President Obama. Four years versus a few days ... Some Googlers are asking why. In 2003, President Bush's detractors successfully gamed the Google search engine by arranging to have...

In August 2006, just a few months in advance of the midterm elections, 26 million citizens were logging on to the Internet to get information about the campaigns, according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. ) That amounts to 13 percent of all adults in the country using the Internet as a tool to make informed political decisions.... And notably, since the inception of Google bombing seven years ago, political Google bombs have been predominantly a tactic of the Left. While Google bombing isn’t exclusive to Democratic partisans (in 2004 a Republican blogger instigated a...

Google's decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday. Google, launched in 1998 by two Stanford University dropouts, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was accused of selling out and reneging on its "Don't be evil" motto when it launched in China in 2005. The company modified the version of its search engine in China to exclude controversial topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Falun Gong movement, provoking a backlash in its core western markets. Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr Brin admitted yesterday: "On a business level,...

Google has finally had it with Googlebombing, the act of hundreds of Internet users linking up specific words with certain web sites in order to produce a desired (and usually comical) search result. The company announced today via its corporate blog that they have finally altered their search engine algorithm to minimize the impact of Googlebombs by improving the way they analyze link structures on web sites. Google's previous stance on this type of Internet pranking was just that—it was a prank and that they didn't want to get involved in manually altering otherwise-harmless antics on the web. Also called...