If you want to have some fun, go to Google and type a search on “miserable failure”. You might be very interested in the top result. But this is not a function of the wonderful folks at Google and their webmastering, but rather a function of Web users that manipulate the rankings by “altering their own pages”. This comes from a great story by Discover magazine here.

Lest this become complicated, the new term for this is called “Gooblebombing”. Without being too technical it is an interesting system that Google uses called PageRank which sorts search results by relevancy based upon “links” at other sites. So, if you have a site about “cats” and enough people put a link out there for “useless domestic animals” on multiple sites, the search engine will eventually return that website if you search for “useless domestic animals.”

This is a dramatic oversimplification and there are additional variables, but it is worth mentioning. It really is a fascinating system that learns over time, but is nonetheless able to be manipulated.