Funny results returned by the search engine

May 9, 2007 08:16 GMT  ·  By

Google's search technology returns some funny information about one of the most famous persons in the entire world, George W. Bush. If you search Google for the phrase "who's george bush", the search engine returns you a funny result: "George Bush was a prominent biblical scholar, preacher and controversialist." Google Blogoscoped noticed this weird result and posted an article on their website, the readers giving even more uncanny information. "Who's Jacques Chirac" will answer your that "Jacques Chirac is the incumbent Head of State (Co-Prince) of Andorra."

As far I can see, all the details are gathered from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that provides a huge amount of information about numerous topics. As you might know, Google also added interoperability between the search technology and Wikipedia, allowing the users to search for encyclopedia information straight from the Google search. For example, all you need to do to find out more details about the president of the US is to type "info George W. Bush."

Although these results might look as a Googlebomb, they aren't, because the information is provided by Wikipedia. Usually, the Googlebombs affecting the search giant's technology were providing malicious weblinks from the Internet that were showing fake information about a certain person. George Bush was one of the celebrities affected by the Googlebombs because some of the fake websites were targeting the president of the US.

Now, there is only one question: how can Google repair this problem as the information is provided by Wikipedia, the website that is indexed as the first result on the Google SERP? It is somehow unfair to make George W. Bush the first result for certain keywords since a different person, George Bush, is also published on Wikipedia?