Political Google Bombs in The 2004 U.S. Presidential Election - Google's Response

Google's Response

Google originally took the position that it would not alter the result (or any other Google-bombed results) because it wished to preserve the integrity of its search engine. On September 28, 2005, a Google blog written by Marissa Mayer (Google Director of Consumer Web Products) began to appear alongside the search results; the blog explains the situation and the company's reason for not manually editing the search results.

"We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission."

In 2007, Google changed their indexing structure so that Google bombs such as "miserable failure" would "typically return commentary, discussions, and articles" about the tactic itself. Google announced the changes on its official blog. In response to criticism for allowing the Google bombs, Matt Cutts, the head of the Google’s web spam team, said that Google bombs had "not been a very high priority for us."

"Over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception."