Bush Bombs 'miserable Failure' in Cyberspace Battle

A new front has opened up in the battle for the White House - on the internet's leading search engine.

The practice of "Google bombing" is gaining momentum as political webloggers realise they can manipulate the results of Google, the top-ranked search site, to make a satirical point.

The first victim was President George Bush, who found last year that his official White House website biography came top of Google's results whenever someone typed in the phrase "miserable failure". Now a battle between Mr Bush's opponents and supporters has catapulted the White House profile of Jimmy Carter, and the home page of writer and filmmaker Michael Moore, to second and third spot in the "miserable failure" stakes.

The online tussle has raised fears that the usefulness of the search engine may be harmed by internet users attempting to distort its results.

The webloggers' weapon lies in the innovative way Google compiles its results. The engine scours the web and uses algorithms to calculate the importance of a page. This technique revolutionised internet searches. But it also means that, if enough sites link to President Bush's official biography page with the clickable text reading "miserable failure", Google will assume that page is the most important "miserable failure" page, and put it top of the listings. Google's greatest strength could now also be its greatest weakness.

Yesterday, the programmer behind the Bush Google bomb told the New York Times he had been surprised at how easy the exercise had been. "The reason it worked is that there were enough like-minded people who thought it was funny and spread it around," said George Johnston, 46, who runs a weblog called Old Fashioned Patriot

· Google dismisses the distortion of its results as a passing internet fad. But some experts say this new "cybergraffiti" trend is harming users.