I wanted to ask Santorum whether he had a strategy for scrubbing his Web presence, but he didn’t return my calls. With Google results like this, what’s an aspiring presidential candidate to do?

Not even Santorum’s ascent as a Fox News contributor or his early campaign swings through the key primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire have managed to bury it. Savage says his site hasn’t been updated for years, yet it remains entrenched in the Google rankings. Eventually it eclipsed Santorum’s own campaign site in search results some observers even suggested it may have contributed to Santorum’s crushing 18-point defeat in his 2006 campaign against Bob Casey. Even though mainstream news outlets would never link to it, Savage’s site rose in the Google rankings, thanks in part to bloggers who posted Santorum-related news on the site or linked to it from their blogs. Santorum’s problem got its start back in 2003, when the then-senator from Pennsylvania compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, saying the “definition of marriage” has never included “man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.” The ensuing controversy prompted syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who’s gay, to start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for slang terms to “memorialize the scandal.” The winner came up with the “frothy mixture” idea, Savage launched a website, and a meme was born.

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