Internet Parody Hands French Military a Defeat
by Richard J. Dalton Jr
Newsday, March 13, 2003
The French always end up as military toast, or so it seems from a search on the popular Google search engine. But a miffed Canadian student is actually behind a prank that says no documents are found in a Google search for "French military victories."
The search brings up a page that asks: "Did you mean 'french military defeats.'"
The French did win some wars. In fact, Google lists about 63,100 pages of French military victories.
But a Web page says no documents are found when searching for "French military victories" using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which bypasses the list of search results and jumps directly to the first Web page in the list.
That happens to be a mock-up page of Google, suggesting a search for "french military defeats." The large Google logo at the top tends to distract Web surfers from the address in the Web browser:
www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/victories.html.
Steve Lerner, a 22-year-old Toronto student, said he created the page as "a humorous way of showing political opposition against France's weaseling."
Lerner said he received 50,000 hits in 18 hours on Tuesday, before the site went down for technical reasons unrelated to the large volume of Web traffic. He said it will be back up by the weekend or sooner.
Lerner said he managed to make the page the first search result by listing "French military victories" in several key areas. But Google claims its complex search methods make human tampering with search results difficult.
Lerner hasn't heard from Google, and chances are he won't.
A spokesman for Google , based in Mountain View, Calif., had no comment. But the search engine generally turns its back on parodies, recognizing that eventually the pages will be less visible as they fall down further in the search engine's results
Originally Posted by http://www.google-watch.org/newsday.html
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