Hitwise Intelligence - LeeAnn Prescott - US
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October 18, 2005
Googlebombing "failure" vs. "miserable failure"
Last July, "failure" overtook "miserable failure" as one of the leading "Google bombs." A Google bomb occurs when a large number of webmasters link a specific word or phrase to a particular webpage, leading to a high rank in Google's results for that phrase. The first organic result for both "failure" and "miserable failure" is currently George W. Bush's biography. Interestingly, searches on "failure" took off in September, when the share of searches on that term increased by 495% during the week ending September 17 compared to the previous week. Google even crafted a response, posting a sponsored listing on the search page, explaining that there was no political bias in the result.
My question is: Why did "failure" take off again in September? The "miserable failure" result has been around since 2003, and "failure" has been around since June. Could it possibly have something to do with the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina? If you have a hypothesis, please share.
Here are a few interesting factoids that turned up in the Hitwise data: For the four weeks ending October 15, only 84% of the "failure" searches were performed on Google. So 16% of those seeking a Google bomb were not searching on Google. Also, "failure" made up 51% of searches containing the word "failure." "Miserable failure" was next, at 3%, and "congestive heart failure" was third at 2%. Finally, only 82% of searchers clicked through to a result, and 40% of those went to the White House result and 4.6% went to Michael Moore's site.
Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 11:18 AM
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Comments
Following Katrina the 'failure' search blossomed here - I started getting emails from American friends who had just found it and thought it was funny, and gradually it began to roll around internal office emails here, until it was spreading like wildfire. I work for the government and there's A LOT of internal email. It was definitely associated with the perception that the White House did a lousy job over Katrina - almost every version I received mentioned the hurricane.
Posted by: Anonymous at October 19, 2005 08:29 PM
