Political Google bombs in the 2004 U.S. presidential election

In October 2003, an effort was launched to create links of "miserable failure" to the official White House biography of President Bush.

In about six weeks, the link to George W. Bush's biography became the first result for "miserable failure" on a Google search.

A blogger from Washington has since taken credit for starting this tactic, though the phrase had been in heavy use following its adoption as a catchphrase by the Dick Gephardt campaign.

In May 2003, Dan Savage, a sex columnist and LGBT rights activist, asked his readers to create a definition for the word "santorum" in response to then United States Senator Rick Santorum's views on homosexuality, and comments about same sex marriage.

Democratic partisan e-mailing lists and blogging groups began passing the word to do similar things in the same time period.

[11] On September 28, 2005, a Google blog written by Marissa Mayer (Google Director of Consumer Web Products) began to appear alongside the search results; the blog explains the situation and the company's reason for not manually editing the search results.

Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.