QI doesn’t quite get its facts right?

QI – the quiz show hosted by the always excellent Stephen Fry – aired a recent episode named “France”. In an uncharacteristic and momentary diversion from the absolute truth Stephen Fry says:

In fact there was a time when if you Googled “French Military Victories” Google returned – because someone had written a very clever little program inside it – they returned “Did you mean French Military Defeats”?

For the moment at least, the episode can be seen on BBC iPlayer.

The truth is actually a little bit different – Google (as far as I know) has never returned the question “Did you mean French Military Defeats?” in its results. Instead a cheeky Canadian student created a web page with a fake version of the Google search results showing the offending phrase. Through a technique called Googlebombing he (and his co-conspirators) got the result to the first position in the search results for the term “French Military Victories”, so that when you pressed the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button his was the page that was shown, not the Google results. This actually still works.

However anyone pressing the plain old boring “Search” button would have seen normal results:

It’s clever, and it amused a lot of people, but it’s not quite the same as Google showing the question.

Still, this is a very nitpicky complaint and I’ve done enough serious BBC bashing lately. All I’ll say is that it is an honour and a privilege to correct the consistently great and fascinating Stephen Fry for once.

Incidentally, you can also see Mr Fry in fine form on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross – an excellent episode showing why its good to have Ross back on our screens. He is without doubt the most entertaining chat show host we’ve got going – it’s time to forgive and forget!