GOP.com Delisted From Google For Repeated Syntactic Errors

Mountain View, CA, January 29, 2008 -- A spokesman for Google confirmed today the official website of the Republican party, gop.com, has been delisted from the internet search engine due to repeated spelling and syntactical errors.

A Google search for gop.com returns zero results

The spokesman said the decision to delist gop.com was made automatically on the basis of syntactical algorithms, and did not necessarily represent the opinion or action of any human Google employee.

"Our search engine robots look at many, many different factors when determining the placement of a website in our search results," Artie Su, a technology coordinator with Google, said. "It's not like someone looked at the site and pressed a big red delete button or anything. Well, to be honest, some of our engineers do occasionally press the button for, like, their ex-girlfriend's site or a band they really hate, but the practice is not officially condoned."

According to Mr. Su, the gop.com delisting was most likely triggered by repeated misuse of the word "democrat".

"The Republican party seems to believe that there exists such as thing as the 'Democrat Party', when, as every third grader in the country knows, it's called the Democratic Party," Mr. Su said. "Either the people who run gop.com are dumber than most third-graders, or there is a systematic effort to somehow misuse 'democrat' for some kind of snarky pejorative effect. Our spiders don't particularly care."

"When our systems syntactically analyze the words on a page," Mr. Su continued, "it's very easy to determine whether correct grammar is being followed. When it isn't, particularly if the errors are consistently repeated over a period of time, the site gets downgraded. That's because most spammers and creators of junk commercial sites don't do any kind of quality control. Grammar check is an easy way to spot them."

Mr. Su pulled up a random page of gop.com to demonstrate:

"You see? Right here we have headlines that include phrases such as 'Michigan Democrat Primary' and 'the Democrat candidates'. That's just illiteracy. If our robots found consistent use of the phrase 'Republ candidates', or 'Rebuplican primary' on a Democratic party site, that would probably get downgraded as well."

Questioned as to whether the Republican party was intentionally erring in its appellation of the rival Democratic Party, Mr. Su said, "I'm no political analyst, so I certainly couldn't tell you. But I sincerely hope the level of political discourse in this country is a little higher than that. I don't wish to believe people, especially people who are supposed to be running the greatest country in the world, could be that freaking juvenile."

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor