More evil than Satan himself

Once upon time, searching for keywords "more evil than Satan himself" in Google would give Microsoft's web page as the first, best-ranked search result.

This thing was also mentioned in SJGames' website; they also did some other empirical queries. Apparently Google denied it was an insider joke, and Microsoft certainly wasn't aware of this.

The reason for this is simple, if you think carefully: Google indexes the results based on importance. Now, people who proclaim Bill is Satan Incarnate on their page link to Microsoft's page... I leave the rest for your vivid imagination.

This does not work anymore - at the moment, the top result is, ironically enough, an article in Search Engine Watch about this phenomenon...

To clear this up: Google considers which words are used to link to a site, not only words that appear on that site. Thus, the few times "more evil than satan" appeared on the web, it linked to a page with a very high page rank: Microsoft's. Once the news spread, the news stories themselves achieved a higher search rank than the uncommon link and high-ranking Microsoft page had alone. Google has since tweaked the way it combines these factors to prevent such odd-ball results from appearing in the future.

At an info session with a Google developer, we were assured again and agin that it would be well-nigh impossible to introduce an intentional easter egg into the Google engine, since something like an additional string comparison for every query would have a massive performance impact over the millions of queries Google handles.