John Hesch

After observing the term failure in Google brings up the biography of President Bush, I wrote to Google to get their response. Here is their reply:

Hi John,

Thank you for your note. The order and contents of Google search results are completely automated. No one hand picks a particular result for a given search query, nor does Google ever insert jokes or send messages by changing the order of results. Occasionally, when a particular website is the subject of public attention, other sites begin linking to it. This may elevate its importance as gauged by our ranking software, which assigns a PageRank value based in part on who links to a given page.

Higher ranking in Google results may lead to more awareness, which may lead to more links and so on. One side effect of not using an editorial viewpoint to determine the ranking of results is that anomalies occasionally occur. We view such occasions as opportunities for us to learn more about how the web works and how to improve our algorithms for all searches in the future.

Regards,
The Google Team

So, am I to understand that relevant content can be superseded by Google Bombing?