GoogleBombing the President

A good & trusted friend sent me a cryptic email recently: 'Google "failure."' This I did to find President Bush's (Dubya's) Whitehouse Bio page at the top of the results. Try it. Aparently the phrase "miserable failure" produces the same kind of giggles.

She, my friend, who is not a techie but is quite sophisticated in many areas (but politically naive) said something like, 'See what those clever people at Google are up to.'

I had to reply to explain that it's not the people at Google but a certain way certain people are abusing the Google search system. It's called "Google Bombing" and here's Google's rather vague but official explanation.

In fact, Microsoft officials -- or interns or some sub-group of the invertabrates that run the Microsoft Corporation -- do this all the time to people on their shitlist. I know because I've been on it: there was once a fake site, Sam & Carol Hiser's Herbal Remedies (or something to that effect), lurking high on the list if you Googled my name (I don't know any Carols, and the only other Sam Hiser I'm aware of is an aerospace engineer at NorthrupGrumman...I was getting his email for a spell...it wasn't that interesting). Likewise, Tom Adelstein's past as a Grammy-winning musician was bombed to high-up among his links. We found out this was accomplished through a bot connected with the MSN service that was automatically generating a lot of hits to these phoney or obsolete sites. The banality of mechanized evil.

What's so encouraging and ridiculous is that Microsoft people should have this perception that being a musician or having herbal interests or talents should compromise one's credibility or judgement at seeing Microsoft people as the Fascist Cabal they are.