Is Stephen Colbert the Greatest Living American?

Google says so: it must be true! Right? Not so fast.

The most recent example of a so-called "Googlebomb" granted him this highly coveted status by having lots and lots of people link to this page using the words "Greatest Living American".

Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan was surprised to see this happen, because a "fix" made to the Google Rank algorithm earlier in the year was supposed to have made this impossible for pages that weren't relevant to the terms being linked, and Colbert's page only contained the term "American" on it, but not the words "greatest" or "living", which means it should have not ranked that well for the combination of the three terms. So it's ranking indeed was fundamentally based solely on link popularity.

Not what everyone will tell you in Search Engine Optimization class, but... Who knows? It's Google's algorithm: maybe they love Colbert! :)