Miserable failure - Definition and Overview

"Miserable failure" is a term applied to any project, undertaking, or entity that underperforms to such a dramatic extent that, in the opinion of the individual using the phrase, it might as well not have been undertaken at all.

The term was applied to the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush by Dick Gephardt. Later, after a thorough Googlebombing, George W. Bush's biography page [1] (http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html) was arranged to appear as the #1 Google hit for that specific search query [2] (http://www.google.ca/search?q=miserable+failure&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&meta=).

In retaliation, Bush supporters Google-bombed Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Moore with the same phrase.

On an interesting note, "Miserable failure" on other various popular search engines have yielded similar results:

• Altavista (http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q=miserable+failure)
• HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com/default.asp?query=miserable+failure)
• LookSmart (http://search.looksmart.com/p/search?qt=miserable+failure)
• Lycos (http://search.lycos.com/default.asp?loc=searchhp&tab=web&query=miserable+failure)
• MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com/info.metac/search/web/miserable%2Bfailure)
• Yahoo! (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=miserable+failure)
• MSN Search (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=SRCHWB&q=miserable%20failure)