Jeb Bush is not the master of his domain.
While the Republican presidential hopeful's campaign owns and operates an official website, Jeb2016.com, it apparently failed to secure JebBush.com. If you try visiting the unofficial domain, you'll be redirected to DonaldJTrump.com, the campaign site for GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.
It's not clear whether Trump had anything to do with this, though The Daily Caller has implied as much.
According to the domain history for JebBush.com, it was first registered in 1997 and updated Oct. 20, 2015. It's currently registered to Fabulous PTY Ltd., which provides website management tools and ad revenue. CNN reported in April that JebBush.com was available for $250,000.
Bush isn't the first of the competitors for the Republic presidential nomination to experience this flavor of digital tweak: Texas Senator Ted Cruz doesn't own TedCruz.com. Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina failed to register CarlyFiorina.org before someone else snapped it up.
However, domain name hijinks are much less likely to influence the outcome of a race than they might have a decade ago, as Hunter Schwarz reported at the Washington Post earlier this year. Unless a fake web address gets a huge surge in media attention, inbound links and shares on social media, it's unlikely to rank high in Google Search results, which means most people won't ever see what's on it.
Regardless of the presumed lack of impact on the race, the JebBush.com episode is a black eye for the former Florida governor's presidential campaign, which should have locked up that web address years ago.
Overlooking this detail also supports what a source told Politico in June: Matt Lira, who's now a senior advisor to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, felt that the Bush campaign was "too focused on TV advertising and not enough on building a digital presence — which is what he’d planned to do."
What may be more worrisome to all of the Republican field is some evidence of search engine bias that favors Democrats -- as researchers at the University of Maryland have found.
While it remains a stretch to claim that "Google is Hillary Clinton's 'secret weapon,'" as the primaries grown nearer, information searches for candidates will spike in the coming year, putting a premium on search engine optimization from the campaigns.
Smart, well-financed campaigns won't just make sure that their candidate's official website and social media accounts rank high: They'll also advertise against the search results for other candidate's names, getting targeted attack ads on the screens of mobile voters who may no longer be reachable through traditional television ads.
While this kind of redirected interest is inconvenient for the Bush campaign, it could be worse. Just ask former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum about his Google problem.