Guess who’s #1 in MSN’s new, not-yet-finished search engine for “miserable failure.” Yep, it’s Dubbya. Specifically, his biography page on Whitehouse.gov. (In case you’re curious, there’s no mention of “miserable” or “failure” anywhere on his page). Gee, that’s just like Google. Good job, Microsoft… not!

With all the talk about “Google bombing” being bad for the Web and how Google seems to be working to stamp out the effect of blogs, here comes another me-too engine blindly going down the same silly path, letting link text on its own, mainly from blogs, and without any contributing “on-page factors,” dominate the ranking algorithm.

Last year I wrote about how Microsoft is gunning for Google, and they may have a shot at it. Well, after test-driving Redmond’s latest incarnation of the MSN search preview, I have serious doubts they’ll be able to pull it off.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Microsoft. After all, Yahoo!, Wisenut, and the new engine Snap all rank George W. #1 for “miserable failure”. Teoma ranks him #3. So all the major engines take link text into account — BIG TIME. Hmm… I wonder why we don’t ever hear talk about “Yahoo bombing”?

Personally, I don’t think Hillary Rodham Clinton deserved to be #2, but there’s no point arguing with a behemoth.