Old Web Prank Links "Obama" With "Failure"
A five-year-old online prank that mocked President Bush is now aiming its snarkiness at Barack Obama.
Search for “failure” on Google or “miserable failure” on Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s search engines, and the top result you’ll get is likely to be a link to a biography of President Obama on the official Whitehouse.gov Web site. Before the inauguration, those searches linked to a biography of President Bush.
Search engine experts said Mr. Obama is now the butt of the online joke because his Web team failed to clean up a jumble of links left behind by Mr. Bush’s crew. The White House press office did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
The prank began in 2003, when a blogger angry at Mr. Bush encouraged his readers to link the words “miserable failure” on their own Web sites to Mr. Bush’s official biography on the Web. Google interprets incoming links on the Web as votes that establish the popularity of a page and its relevancy to a certain query. The prank worked, as Google began interpreting searches for “miserable failure” as requests to see the official biography of George W. Bush.
: