If you search Google for the phrase “miserable failure” you won’t find Bush in the top result anymore:
Google has turned over new algorithms that know how to handle Googlebombing:
By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs).
Wikipedia is fast on the scene, but only noting that:
On January 25th, 2007 Google announced on its official Google Webmaster Central blog that they now have “an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.”
There’s a bit of an edit war going on to try and decide what this means. How do you detect an intentional Google bomb from simply a newly popular site? This could have an accidental impact on a lot of smaller websites.