The Miserable Failure Of A Google Bombs Article Search Ranking

There's a "Back Off National Pork Board" controversy, where the National Pork Board is using a trademark claim to threaten a lawsuit against a breastfeeding activist for a T-shirt with the slogan "The Other White Milk."

But this post isn't about that.

Rather, in passing, in the SearchEngineLand article National Pork Board Goes After Breastfeeding Search Marketer, when discussing an earlier Google-Bomb article, it's noted that the post on SearchEngineLand.com about "miserable failure" DOESN'T SHOW UP (in the top 100 items) for a Google search on the terms [miserable failure].

Now, that's interesting (Danny, you've got to scream "I'M BEING CENSORED!", and get some A-list bloggers to theorize about how Google is suppressing you so as not to let out the secrets of Google bombing. Or maybe because comments in the article on how to re-ignite Google bombs are considered dangerous. Or Homeland Security had Google remove it because it was talking about bombs. Something like that ...). It's around #46 in Yahoo for [miserable failure], so some of the difference is legitimate outranking. But still, there's a divergence.

The article is in the Google index, since it comes up as #1 for the searches [Google Kills] and [Other Google Bombs]. Even #1 for [Bush Miserable] and #2 for [Failure Search].

But it's around #450 for [Google Bombs]. #390 for ["Google Bombs"].

I conclude [Miserable Failure] is in a general class of searches (like [Google Bombs]) where Google is doing something different from e.g. [Google Kills], and perhaps weighing age/trust more strongly. No reason all searches have to go through the exact same algorithm, we know that they don't. It's a coincidence this was noticed for "miserable failure" in specific.

Learn something new every day ...

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)