French military victories (practical joke)
French Military Victories is an Internet phenomenon and highly-reported Googlebomb created by albinoblacksheep.com which jokes AbOUT a particular view of the French military. This Googlebomb was done in early 2003, during the lead-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
The government of France question the supposed existence of caches of weapons of mass destruction and opposed the rush to an invasion of Iraq. This led to attempts by war-supporters to promote hatred of the French by vilifying, disparaging and ridiculing the French, often depicting the French as rude, shifty, unclean, American-hating cowards.
A Google search for "French military victories", using the "I'm feeling lucky" button, produces a fake error page saying:
- Did you mean: 'French military defeats '?
- No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.
- Your search - French military victories - did not match any documents.
The page is designed to look like a standard page returned by Google when no matches were found, with the search engine offering a way in which it could return results (a function usually used for spelling mistakes). Google took no measures to counter this disparagement campaign. The effect has lessened with time since Google has slightly modified the design of their pages while this page remains in the old style.
See also
- Anti-French sentiment in the United States
- Francophobia
- googlebomb