Newsday: Miserable Failure? Google Trick Says It's Bush
BBC: 'Miserable failure' links to Bush
NY Times: Foes of Bush Enlist Google to Make Point
In an interesting example of how Google's algorithm can be exploited, a team of webmasters chose to anchor links to President George Bush's bio with the term "miserable failure," giving his bio a top ranking in Google. Google's algorithm is a democratic one, and if a critical mass of reputable web sites link to a page with the same anchor link, Google assumes that the page is relevant for the term. The same trick was used during the last election (with a far more derogatory phrase), which Google removed.
