Who among the many candidates running for president is unelectable? George W. Bush — if the search results on Google can be believed.

His biography is the first result to appear on Google for the Web query “unelectable.” It’s just one in a long list of similarly bizarre results on the search engine over the years that arethe result of manipulation, not their relevance.

Called Google bombs, these are pranks engineered by Web site operators and creators of Web logs. They take advantage of the way Google ranks search results to get certain Web sites listed higher for specific queries than they otherwise would be.

That’s why President Bush’s biography also appears as the top result for the search query “miserable failure.”

In another example, entering the phrase “French military victories” and hitting the “I’m Feeling Lucky” key returns a satirical Web site that looks like a Google page and asks, “Did you mean French military defeats?”

Google’s response to the bombs — which have increased in frequency during the presidential campaign — is generally laissez-faire, according to Peter Norvig, the company’s director of search quality. Though aware of many of the manipulations, he doesn’t consider them to be a major problem.

“It’s not a big issue,” Norvig said. “We could spend our time taking care of these one at a time, but we don’t think it’s worth our while.”

News source: SF Gate - Google targeted by pranksters. Web site operators, bloggers skew results.