Is Google bombing hactivism ?

Hactivism is defined on Wikipedia web site as following: Hacktivism (a portmanteau of hack and activism) is "the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous digital tools in pursuit of political ends. These tools include web site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service attacks, information theft, web site parodies, virtual sit-ins, virtual sabotage, and software development."

As there are many clear cases of hactivism I would like to propose a somewhat unique case of political campaign , just to try to figure out whether or not this case falls into hacktivism category.

On Sunday 7, 2003 BBC News reported that Google search for the term "miserable failure" gives the president of the United States George W. Bush as the first search result. That was the year when the Iraq war started, lets remember.

Web users entering the words "miserable failure" into the popular search engine were directed to the biography of the president on the White House website. The trick was possible because Google searches more than just the contents of web pages - it also counts how often a site is linked to, and with what words. Thereby the online community or activists can affect the results of Google searches - called "Google bombing" - by linking their sites to a chosen one.

This trick they pulled got worldwide coverage and could be seen some kind of a political protest.

The term hactivism presumes that some illegal activity is carried out or some legally ambigious activity goes on. While this could not be the case - no laws where broken by anyone and no machines were directly hacked, it can be argued that the Google robots were manipulated in a certain way, so that the search engines algorithm needed to be changed eventually.

This W. Bush Google bombing case became the most famous case and remained so until Google changed its engine algorithm so that the Google bombing cases, such as this one organized by George Johnston on the Old Fashion Patriot blog, are harder to organize these days.