Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point, by Tom McNichol. New York Times (Jan 22) -- more on Google Bombing. Now "miserable failure" is pinned on President George W Bush, President Jimmy Carter, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Michael Moore.
Of interest --
"The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through "Google bombing," or manipulating the Web's search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy. "
"Some Google bombs may have been accomplished with as few as 20 links. What is important is not the number of links, but rather the popularity of the sites doing the linking and the relative obscurity of the search term.
Bombers aim at Google for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks - that's where the payoff is. Google handles more than 200 million requests a day and has a 34.9 percent share of online searches in the United States. The nearest rival is Yahoo, with 27.7 percent, according to comScore Networks, which tracks consumer behavior. "