As Nathan pointed out here, the “failure” Google-bomb is pretty entertaining, but it looks like there is some counter-bombing going on here, which is the first time I’ve noticed that kind of thing.
For the unfamiliar, the definition of a “google bomb” is best illustrated by seeing it in action. In this case, open up google and type in “failure” and click “I’m feeling lucky”.
The anatomy of how this works is that the “feeling lucky” link takes you directly to the top entry in the search results. The strategy then is to get the page you want to be referenced to be bumped up into the top result. In this case, to see what the competition is trying to do, just do a regular search on “failure” and note the #2 entry.
You may be wondering how this type of result manipulation is possible, since the people performing the “bombing” do not have control over the pages themselves. The reason is the way that links factor into Google’s page rank. For example, this blog does not contain my name anywhere in its text, but if you put my first and last name into Google, this site will be the #1 result. This is because there are a lot of links to this site which have my name as the link text. If you go to Google’s cached copy of the page, it will tell you that the page in question does not contain the search words, it only appears because of referring links.
Anyway, just thought that may amuse some of you out there.