Back in the good old days of the Internet, when you Googled "dumb motherfucker," the first result you got back was a link to a store selling George W. Bush tees. It was the result of a "Google bomb," where crafty blogger types gamed Google's search engine algorithm by linking specific keywords to a single site, to juice up the chances anyone searching for those keywords would be pointed to the site they favored. There have even been contests to see who could come up with the most creative use of search engine optimization tricks to get various phrases linked to specific web addresses. But now, no fun Google — who has long frowned on the practice — says it's disabled the loophole entirely.

Indeed, a search for "miserable failure" used to turn up President Bush's whitehouse.gov site. Now, it returns an article about how a search for "miserable failure" used to turn up President Bush's whitehouse.gov site. A search for "Peter King" no longer brings up a Newsday article titled "King Endorses Ethnic Profiling." And "talentless hack," one of the original Google Bombs that has the search engine pointing results to a friend's website, merely brings up the Wikipedia entry for Google Bombing.

It's all thanks to a retooling of Google's algorithms, which are now set to spot this clustering effect of link swarms and kills their intended results. But fret not, agenda-prone bloggers aren't through with their efforts. The 2.0 version of Google Bombing is alive and well: Linking politicans' names not to their official bios, but to negative news articles about them.

[WaPo]