Google Purges Obama 'Failure' Links

It didn't take very long into Barack Obama's presidency for a group of users to declare him a “failure"--or for them to assert such feeling by way of Google.

Following in the footsteps of the much publicized “miserable failure" Googlebombing of George W. Bush, the “group" greeted the new president during his first days in office by assuring that searches for the world “failure" brought him to the top of the list of results (a sunnier version of the move did the same with the phrase “cheerful achievement.")

The problem? A legacy of Googlebombing attached to official government sites featuring Bush, which transitioned over to Obama after the inauguration.

Google addressed the prank in a recent blog post, stating:

“Rather than edit these prank results by hand, we developed an algorithm a few years ago to detect Googlebombs. We tend not to run it all the time, because it takes some computing power to process our entire web index and because true Googlebombs are quite rare (we joke around the Googleplex that more articles have been written about Googlebombs than there are actual examples of Googlebombs)."

Google ran the algorithm, and now, in a turn for the meta, searches for the terms “cheerful achievement" and “failure" will lead users to online posts about the Googlebombs, rather than the Googlebombs themselves.