A Google search for “miserable failure” now turns up President Bush’s homepage.

Ignoring the fact is that George Bush is not a failure - despite not being very good at anything, he’s managed to become the most powerful man in the world - there is a more essential point: This is yet another ignorant attempt by members of the blogosphere to Google Bomb:

‘This is just one of those spontaneous things that a blogger will post something and other bloggers will say, “This is a great idea”‘

Translation: “Let’s have our tiny cabal politicise the world’s most influential reference with misinformation for fun.” Only 32 pages were needed to put this search term top of Google.

Not wishing to sound too much like Andrew Orlowski but the bloggers are becoming dangerous - distorting everything they get their hands on (vis. the empowering concepts of Smart Mob and the Second Superpower being turned into much more airheaded technocratic fancies) in favour of some vacuous ideology-free postmodern showing-off.

To be fair, Google is not a public body, it is a private company who happen to do internet searches, but it is still the world’s foremost information resource, and to distort it on political or personal whims is childish and dangerous. How can we have the ‘freedom of the Internet’ the bloggers claim to be the vanguard of (when they’re not, ironically, moaning about blog spamming), when they’re happy to fiddle the results as they please?

Of course, all this could be solved if Google took blogging properly into account when doing PageRank, but they seem remarkably lax about this…

PS: Yes, I know I’m using my blog to slag off blogging - I’ve done this before. So what if I am? The point still stands.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 6th, 2003 at 00:15:15 and is filed under General.