The Joy of Google Bombing

Everyone knows that typing miserable failure into Google brings up the official White House biography of 2004 presidential hopeful George W. Bush (hoping to finally be elected in 2004, that is). The story of the White House’s “Google bombing” made the BBC news and brightened just about everyone’s Friday last week. Google bombing is quite simple: get enough websites using the right key words to link to a particular page, and bingo!—Dubya like a deer in the headlights!

Here’s what you do. For “miserable failure”, include the following code somewhere in the <body> section the html of your webpage:
<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html">miserable failure</a>
Got that? Now, kids, let’s hone our newfound interactive activism skills with a few exercises. Remember, practice makes perfect!

#1
Ted Koppel, Talking Comb-Over:
<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/Nightline/nl_koppel_bio.html">Talking Comb-Over</a>
A subspecies of the “talking hairdo” epithet used to describe superficial newscasters. In the Democratic Presidential Debate on 9 Dec 03 ABC’s Ted Koppel got slammed when candidate Dennis Kucinich turned Koppel’s “When do you pull out” barb around, blasting Koppel and the media in general for preferring to focus on endorsements, polls and money instead of substantive policy issues. Kucinich made an ass of Koppel and garnered sustained applause (full transcript here), but the following day the injured comb-over’s network struck back, announcing that they would no longer cover Kucinich’s campaign.
[Update 17 Jan 04: It worked! Koppel is now the Google's number one talking comb-over. Now, how about skewering CBS's "eye" logo with "closed eye" or "see no evil" in response to the network's refusal to air the Bush-bashing "Child's Pay" ad during the Super Bowl? Seems that CBS's parent company Viacom is too busy lobbying the White House and Congress to raise the limits on media consolidation which they've already exceeded.]

#2
EPA, Salad to gag on:
<a href="http://www.epa.gov/">Salad to gag on</a>
George W. Bush issued a gag order on the Environmental Protection Agency in April 2003 from publicly discussing its findings on perchlorate (a rocket and missile fuel component) content in the nation’s winter lettuce crop.

#3
Bertie Wooster:
<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html">Bertie Wooster</a>
Verteran radio interviewer Studs Terkel had me in stitches with his apt description of Dubya as a “Bertie Wooster”. To be fair, P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Bertie was merely a bumbling child of privilege (always being saved by his resourceful butler Jeeves), and not nearly as mean-spirited at Dubya.

#4
Fox News Wholly Without Merit:
<a href="http://www.foxnews.com">Wholly Without Merit</a>
The verdict on Fox New’s suit against Al Franken, and presumably on the network’s coverage itself. Actually, we can skip this exercise for now, since “wholly without merit” already brings up page after page on Franken’s (and the court’s) humiliation of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly.

#4
Prince of Darkness: So many possibilities: Bush, Cheney, Richard Perle? You decide...

Max D.
11 December 2003

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