STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

JMR · Dooney & Bourke

I don't want to bash anyone - but this is funny

tara t · Marc Jacobs

ohhh... ouch !!! but funny. frightening, but funny.

Christine · Coach

nunzi182 · Kate Spade

Pretty funny :)

Maybe I'm dumb here, but what's the purpose of that "I'm feeling lucky" button?

Christine · Coach

nunzi182 wrote:

Pretty funny :)

Maybe I'm dumb here, but what's the purpose of that "I'm feeling lucky" button?

The purpose is to save people time, if they're "feeling lucky," by bringing them straight to the #1 search result displayed page rather than displaying pages upon pages of results.

dc · Dooney & Bourke

I read about that - I am not sure I am right about how it works exactly, but apparently you can "fix" google results (I guess by clicking on a given result over and over again so it becomes the most popular). So - without giving away the result here - I hear that those two top results keep switching places b/c "operatives" for both sides have been hitting the sites over and over in an effort to make the one they most want to appear as a "failure" be #1.

FashionPrincess · Hermes

I don't necessarily attach a negative view with the word failure. Failure is what happens to everyone on the road to success, and successful people just weren't afraid of failing in order to ultimately succeed. If you look at history, everyone that has had a major impact or success has had a lot of so called failures. Anyway, not to get all deep, I know you just meant it as a joke, but I agree w/dc, it's totally rigged.

jj · Kate Spade

I was curious too, and this was posted next to GW's bio...the official word from Google:

Googlebombing 'failure'

9/16/2005 12:54:00 PM

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.

Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. 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.

sephorablue · Marc Jacobs

my favorite was the one from a couple years ago, where if you googled "weapons of mass destruction," the top link would be this page that was a carbon copy of the usual internet error page, except all the text was about WMD. "The weapons of mass destruction you are looking for are currently unavailable," etc etc. I don't remember what it said but I do remember that it was hilarious.

lindsayp · Kenneth Cole

there was also one about French military victories. An error thing came up saying that you're stupid, and the French never actually won anything

Alex · Nine West

That is truly hilarious!