During the presidential election of the United States in 2004, Google bombs were used to further various political agendas. Two of the first were the "miserable failure" Google bomb linked to George W. Bush's White House biography and the "waffles" Google bomb linked to John Kerry's website. Supporters and detractors of the candidates were able to manipulate search engine rankings so that searches for "miserable failure" and "waffles" returned links to the targets' sites. In 2006, Google altered its searching algorithm to make massive link farms less effective, making search results less politically slanted. In January 2009, President Barack Obama's official White House web site also appeared on the first few results for "miserable failure" on Live Search and Yahoo, and on the first page of results for the word "failure" on Google. The cause of this is disputed, with some claiming it to be the result of a similar campaign. Others believe it to be a result of URL redirection from the old White House site (under President Bush) to the site for President Barack Obama. Because the HTTP 301 redirect indicates that the old page is permanently replaced by the new one, it also inherits all links to it and therefore the ranking for the same keywords. Bombing of George W. Bush U.S. President George W. Bush was the subject of a variety of Google bombs. "Miserable failure" was the first. In October 2003, an effort was launched to create links of "miserable failure" to the official White House biography of President Bush. In about six weeks, the link to George W. Bush's biography became the first result for "miserable failure" on a Google search. A blogger from Washington has since taken credit for starting this tactic, though the phrase had been in heavy use following its adoption as a catchphrase by the Dick Gephardt campaign. For a time, Bush's official biography had also become the top result for both "miserable" and "failure". Bombing of John Kerry Senator John Kerry was also the target of Google bombs. The first of these is the "waffles" Google bomb. In April 2004, Ken Jacobson, then a law school student at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh launched the "waffles" Google bombing of Kerry, in part to retaliate for Democrats' Google bombing of George W. Bush. He encouraged linking of "waffles" to John Kerry's official site. The term "waffling" is used to describe the