Bush, Miserable Failure.

This year, Google started a widely used news service. Last week, it seemed to some users of the Google search engine that the site had started to editorialize. Anyone searching on Google for the phrase "miserable failure" was sent to the official White House biography of President George W. Bush..
Google said it had no corporate opinion of the Bush presidency. Instead, the episode is an example of a form of cybergraffiti known as "Google bombing.".
It is a group prank. If enough Web pages link a certain Web page to a phrase, the Google search engine will start to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of Bush's biography, the phrase does not occur on the destination Web site. Recently, for example, the No. 1 search result on Google for the term "weapons of mass destruction" has been a satiric Web page made to look like a Microsoft error message..
Inspired by this and stirred by his objections to Bush's policies, a computer programmer, George Johnston, created a Google bomb to tie Bush's official biography to the phrase "miserable failure," watchwords of the presidential campaign of a Bush opponent, Dick Gephardt. Johnston said he had no association with the Gephardt campaign and in fact preferred another Democratic candidate, Dennis Kucinich..
In the middle of October, Johnston created links on his blog - oldfashionedpatriot.blogspot.com - tying the phrase to the Bush biography and began to tell writers of other blogs. Many added the phrase to their own sites and urged readers to do the same..
Craig Silverstein, Google's director for technology, says the company saw nothing wrong with the public using its search engine this way. No user is hurt, he said, because there is no clearly legitimate site for "miserable failure" being pushed aside. Moreover, he said, Google's results were taking stock of the variety of opinions expressed online. "We just reflect the opinion on the Web," he said, "for better or worse.".
The New York Times