he's gone on my listings and I'm not logged in or using personalized settings

I know at least dozen of SEOs that use that exact cases every day for link-juice explanations.

But - Google adds (that's what I get) a sponsored top with:

Why these results?
www.google.com/googleblog These results may seem politically slanted. Here's what happened.

linked to a Marissa Mayer's post on google blog:

Googlebombing 'failure'

9/16/2005 12:54:00 PM
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.

Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

Looks like it's still ranking...

http://www.google.com/search?q=French+Military+Victories

@MattKP : that was a 3rd party cookie warning from the webtrends analytics tool they have installed on there. I sent them an email from my government email address to let them know.

This is definately down to

the meta refresh and G's better understanding of them since BD implementation. Also nice opportune advert in the Adwords from Red Brick Media imho

Please correct me where I am wrong but this is what I see...

If you check the headers on https://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html or http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html they do not return a 301 redirect. Which, I would assume, is advisable for whoever is maintaining the page - kill the old page and its history, rebuild anew (sounds like republican policy anyway).

But when you do the header check, a 200 is returned. Now the only reason I know to do such a thing is as a CS friendly, algo work around. Meaning, all users who have the old page bookmarked (because they like P.Bush) will get the new page and not an error or empty page (if they had just scrubbed the old page).
Likewise, when a crawler comes through they will return a 200 and eat up the content (under the new URL mind you). The only downfall here is a bit of dup. content - but I would assume that will the amount of authority whitehouse.gov has, this won't be an issue.
Lastly (and most important) is the fact that this method of page movement will KILL all INBOUND links to that page. The page is not redirecting properly and thus the history will not redirect.
Ergo - these guys are shady AND getting the best of both worlds.

Please do correct me where I am wrong but this is my assessment of the situation.

Yeah, How does that make them "shady" ?

I can list lots of things I don't like about them. However moving a web page without a 301 doesn't really rank up there on my list of immoral things people do.

Wit: Still getting them as before. Not that I mind the message, heh.

They cleaned up George Bush and Bill Clinton but left Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore. I'm just having a little trouble swallowing this. I could believe that new link filtering might have dropped a lot of sites' links from the mix, but why leave Carter and Moore?

At least get all the victims of the abuse out of the SERPs, guys.

<html>
<head>
<meta HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/">

<title>Please go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff">

<script src="/js/stat.js" language="javascript" type="text/javascript"></script>
<noscript>

<img alt="" border="0" name="DCSIMG" width="1" height="1" src="http://statse.webtrendslive.com/DCSArO55rNH8I36lrbe6wexE5_5B8I/njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript&amp;WT.js=No"/>
</noscript>

</body>
</html>

Right, they changed the old URL to a new one.

I hope we could lay off the political comments here... us republicans are sensitive. lol

I see the new page www.whitehouse.gov/president/ at #1 for miserable failure

I was curious about serps for these "failure" queries, and I've found something imho even more exciting than "failures" not ranking anymore :).

First some background - I live in Poland, we have here our own local google bombs. One of them is targeted against Polish president - for query [ptasia grypa]. In English it means "bird flu". Second bomb is against vice prime minister, for query [kretyn] - in English it would be "dork" :).

Effect which I got on a serp was that for query [failure] Google suggested me to check these two mentioned Polish bombs. Screenshot available here. Anyone with a theory why :)) ?