For many years, Google said it wouldn’t rectify the antics of pranksters who rigged terms like “miserable failure” to bring up a White House biography of George W. Bush as a top result on its search engine.

But last week Google reversed its position, changing its algorithms to eliminate so-called “Google bombs” that yield political or humorous results.

On its blog targeted at Web engineers, Google disclosed it made changes to minimize the impact of the most popular Google bombs. Too many people started to believe that the results reflected the company’s political opinion, it said.

“We’ve seen a lot of misconceptions. People thought Google was behind these or was endorsing these,” the software engineer at Google who posted an explanation of the company’s decision on their Webmaster blog, Matt Cutts, said. “It’s not the case. Most of these can be considered pranks, and the direct impact on all search results is minuscule. But it is good to correct our search quality.”

Because of the changes Google made to its formula, searching for “miserable failure” on Google now pulls up a news story by the BBC about Google bombing as the first result, followed by a Wikipedia entry on the topic and another article in an industry publication. The White House page no longer appears in the top 100 results.

Google isn’t the only search engine affected. Yahoo’s search, for example, still brings up the president’s profile as its top result.