Former President George Bush left President Barack Obama a lot of things which have been dutifully chronicled by the old mainstream and new media. But one item has been overlooked: he inherited Bush’s “Google bomb” linking the Texan in searches with the word “failure.”
The L.A. Time’s Top of the Ticket blog reports:
On his way out, President Bush unintentionally dropped a bomb on President Obama: a “Google bomb.”
Along with an economic crisis and a host of national challenges, Obama inherited a link to an embarrassing Google term, as reported our friends at the Times Technology blog. Remember that prank the blogosphere pulled on Bush a few years ago that skyrocketed the former president’s White House profile page to the top spot for a Google search for “miserable failure?”
It turns out that if you do a search for “failure,” the top entry takes you to Obama’s White House House page.
And on Yahoo? Obama comes up second if you look after “miserable failure” — right after Bush.
Somewhere, Ralph Nader is smiling…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.