ever typed george bush into yahoo!s image search?

Well it's not really anything to do with Google themselves, but the way the Google algorithm works which is what 'decides' how highly a page is a ranked for any given keyword or phrase.

One of the most important factors for getting a high Google rank is how many sites are linking to you (called Link Popularity) and also what anchor text they use. The anchor text is the text contained within the link you click on.

So if enough people are involved you can get pretty much any web page to the top of Google for any particular phrase by having hundreds of people all linking to the same website using the same link text. In this case it was 'miserable failure'.

I think it's also known as a blog bomb, because usually it's bloggers that are responsible for doing this.

So nobody at Google decided to put Georgie boy No 1. for 'miserable failure', that was done entirely by people with web sites.

Search Engine Optimization and getting high google ranks is one of my new and current areas of expertise. So if anybody here has a website and wants to acheive a better search engine position then email me and I'll analyse your site.

Andy