French military victories

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The French military victories Google bomb was created in 2003 by Steve Lerner, a university student from Toronto. Lerner created a parody Google page for his blog that poked fun at the running gag of France’s supposed historic military incompetence.

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Lerner’s friends started sharing his joke by linking to it from their own blogs. Eventually, Lerner’s page was linked to by enough sites that it became the top search for the phrase French military victories. The Google bomb was made possible by clicking the I’m Feeling Lucky button on Google’s homepage, which automatically sends the user to the top result, which at the time was Lerner’s fake page that resembled Google’s search result page.

The first Google bomb was created in 1999. Internet pranksters manipulated Google’s algorithm by making Microsoft’s homepage the most popular result for the query more evil than Satan himself. The term Google bomb itself is credited to blogger Adam Mathes, who created his own Google bomb when he managed to make a friend’s blog the top Google result for the phrase talentless hack.

Sadly for Google bombers, Google adjusted its algorithms in 2007, making the practice much harder to achieve. Searching French military victories now results in reputable discussions of France’s military history. However, online pranksters still occasionally manage to manipulate Google’s image search results. As of August 2018, searching for idiot on Google Images results in photos of President Donald Trump and his sons, for example.