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Well, I hate to break it to these folks, but they're losing.
As evidenced by Google's undeniable stranglehold on the search engine market share, I'd say they're kicking ass and chewing bubblegum. The very thing that brought Google to the top (aside from the minimalist homepage) was the way their search engine brought the most truly relevant results to the top, where competitors like Altavista, Hotbot, Lycos, et. al. didn't do nearly as good of a job (even though they may have indexed as many / more pages.)
There's really no way to completely stop googlebombing, because a computer has no idea where legitimate growth of a search term ends and googlebombing begins. Heuristics can (and are) being applied to block out known link sites, etc. but the example here ("failure" -> GWB) is not just a googlebomb, though it started out as one (the original search term was 'miserable failure" but apparently they've done such a good job that "miserable" is no longer necessary.) At this point, there are so many legitimate sites that have picked this one up that it's everywhere on the web. Sure, they could manually push the ranking of that site down for that search term, but that's a losing battle, and could be viewed as politically motivated / special treatment / whatever.
I've read many articles from site promoters who've grudgingly lauded the brilliance of Google's anti-spam measures. The fact that this massively-popular and pervasive googlebomb can get through doesn't constitute a "loss" if you ask me. They don't have to stop googlebombing, they just have to make it counterproductive / not profitable to googlebomb for fun and profit.
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