Whole Paycheck mystery

July 6, 2007 1:00 PM

Why does a Google search for "whole paycheck" turn up Whole Foods Market as the first hit, but the word "paycheck" is nowhere to be found on those page sources? I know Whole Foods has been the butt of that joke, but I don't understand why they're indexed if the phrase isn't on the website.
posted by hodyoaten to computers & internet (9 comments total)

It's a google bomb.
posted by mbrubeck at 1:00 PM on July 6, 2007

They have each of the words somewhere. The destination has to have the words of the query somewhere on it, now. Google wised-up about Googlebombing.

The White House PR folks shot themselves in the foot when they included the word "failure" in some text, because that activated the "complete failure" Googlebomb that laid dormant for so long. They recently corrected that.
posted by cmiller at 1:29 PM on July 6, 2007

I've heard Whole Foods referred to as Whole Paycheck before because that's how much it costs to shop there.
posted by unsigned at 1:32 PM on July 6, 2007

Ugh, sorry, I managed to miss the second line of your post. What mbrubeck said.
posted by unsigned at 1:34 PM on July 6, 2007

The word paycheck is definitely on their Web site.
posted by desjardins at 1:52 PM on July 6, 2007

If you go to the cached version of the Whole Foods Market page, Google says "these terms only appear in links pointing to this page."

No explanation for why this "Googlebomb" apparently works, though.
posted by so_necessary at 2:16 PM on July 6, 2007

No explanation for why this "Googlebomb" apparently works, though.

Google routinely indexes pages according to the texts of links made to that page, in addition to the text on the page itself. Although this has the unintended consequence of allowing Googlebombs, overall this is a feature, not a bug. It means if you Google british patent office, for example, the first result is the one you expect even though "British" does not appear anywhere on the front page of the UK Intellectual Property Office.

If you specifically want to avoid pages where your terms appear only in links to the page, you can use the allintext: operator.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:29 PM on July 6, 2007 [3 favorites]

You should read the story of nigritude ultramarine to see how you can (sometimes) influence the things google points to.
posted by O9scar at 8:14 PM on July 6, 2007

cmiller: It was "miserable failure", and the correction was on Google's part; apparently they considered it an embarrassment.
posted by dhartung at 9:26 PM on July 6, 2007