Colbert drops a bomb

Considering he's already pranked Wikipedia and weaseled his way into online polls aplenty, here at News.com we're actually kind of surprised that Comedy Central talk show host Stephen Colbert took this long to instigate a self-promoting "Google bombing" campaign.

Google bombing, in case you're unfamiliar, is a method of directing mass links that contain a particular line of text to a certain site, which then bolsters that site's ranking on Google when that line of text is used as a search query. The most famous Google bomb was probably "miserable failure," which directed to George W. Bush's presidential biography for quite some time before Google switched a few algorithms around in order to eliminate the verbal pranks.

Well, sorry, Google, you've got another "bomber" on your hands, and this one has an insane pack of followers behind him. Earlier this week, Colbert announced on his late-night show, The Colbert Report, that he wanted to rank first on Google's search results for the phrase "giant brass balls." (A tad lewd, yes.) Colbert-idolizing bloggers, however, thought that just wasn't good enough, and decided to try to put him at the top of Google's hierarchy for the phrase "Greatest Living American."

The power of crowds worked, apparently, as a search for "Greatest Living American" now directs to the official Colbert Report Web site, ColbertNation.com. But it might not be there permanently; Google might have to invent a new "algorithm" specifically for Colbert. Unfortunately, that'd probably just inflate his ego even more.