Opinion: Who is a failure? Obama, if you do a Google search

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Who is failure? If you trust Google’s top search result to point you to the right answer, it’s President Obama.

The culprit is not a politically charged search engine but rather a Google Bomb.

Such tricks have plagued the White House for some time. Nefarious bloggers exploit the way Google’s algorithm surfaces relevant information by linking a word or group of words -- in this case, “who is failure” -- to a central Web page -- Barack Obama‘s White House profile page.

During President Bush’s term, George W. Bush‘s profile frequently showed up on searches including “failure,” “miserable failure” and “who is failure.” Obama had inherited those “failures” when he took office and his profile was placed online.

For a while, Google seemed to have fixed the problem. But, as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan writes, the game is back on.

Until it’s fixed, you can type in “who is failure” into a Google search box and, for a laugh, watch where it goes.

-- Mark Milian

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