A political battle that takes the Global search giant into its twirl.
US Republican Party, in the recent past, accused Google of manipulating their search algo to support Democratic party. As an aftereffect, Google CEO explained their process of search-ranking. Riding on this controversy the search of “Idiot” jumped to 200 million, which is an all-time high. According to Google trends, the search was very high in the month of July and December 2018.
We can now take a search perspective on that jump and dissect some.
All Those Who Were Victims
Searching for image of IDIOT, viewers got the image of President Trump. The situation was first reported by The Guardian in their story “Search ‘IDIOT’ get Trump”. This media report did a cascading effect. Image search of ‘Idiot’ hugely shot up. The start of the whole story is pinned to president’s visit to UK. There, protesters used the soundtrack of ‘American Idiot’ as theme music for the visit. This can be called the tipping point. Online crusaders took the cue from this and started using the word as an insulting response to the ways the president was working. At the same time, the ‘I’ word was linked to an image of Donald Trump. This spread like wildfire when Reddit users upvoted one such image of the president with the word.
Earlier, in 2009 former first lady Michelle Obama had a similar brush with image distortion. In the early phase of her public life, a caricature was ranked first for image search of ‘Michelle Obama’.
Indian politician Sonia Gandhi is also experiencing a similar situation. People get her Wiki page when one searches for ‘Bar Girl in India.’
How Did This Happen? Is it Google bombing?
When a group of people link to a particular search and deliberately manipulate SERP to change natural search positions, this is called Google bombing. This involves a good number of links. In the process, a group of people bent on creating artificial search results, use similar anchor texts (the phrase one uses to link to another page, of a different color than the original text color of the page) and link to a particular site. Here IDIOT can be the anchor text to link back to a presidential website. But this has clearly not happened. This is not Google bombing.
For the other case, of ‘Bar girl in India’ no links were directed to the Wiki page of Sonia Gandhi.
Clearly, this is also not a Google bombing. Then what?
Is it Google Bias?
Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked to explain why Google image search for “idiot” turned up pictures of Donald Trump — and whether that was a case of intentional bias.
Rejecting the allegation Sundar Pichai explained how search works, “we take the keyword and match it against relevant pages in our database and rank them based on over 200 signals. Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query.” It is hard to manipulate any particular result on a bias.
Relevancy and authority of a website, social signals are few important factors Google uses to rank an identity against a search.
The Power of Social
In Trump’s case, Reddit influenced the SERP most. Reddit is an extremely powerful social site with 25 million daily traffic. Members up-vote a content which gets a better chance of being seen. Google indexes a page within 1 hour of publishing on Reddit. Being such a high authority site, Reddit has the power to influence Google search algo to rank on the first page according to relevance and freshness. When users on Reddit upvoted the post with a picture of Trump linking ‘Idiot’ Google search algorithm started prioritizing the image with the keyword.
The Strength of Media in Google
Other than Reddit-community upvote-push, another factor that worked for the search to click is media story headlines linking the name with the keyword. Once the media published this story, regular people also started sharing it and making their own stories on it. As more and more media and more and more viewers started putting the two, the name of the president and the derogatory word together, they elevated the image rank, establishing the tentative search as confirmed. And it happened around the world. It is also important here to mention that a media link is very strong, having a media title tag with these two words together makes for a sure-fire search rank achiever.
So, how do we free the president?
Google Images tend to grab images from news stories, especially from the higher authority news sites. As long as IDIOT and President’s name come together in headlines and visitors click the link to open any webpage, it will push the image of Trump at the top against the search of IDIOT. (I have not added fuel to it, carefully I tried to avoid it as much possible).
The mystery of the ‘Bar Girl”
In SEO, ‘Title tag’ and ‘CTR’ have a real impact on search result and ranking. Title tag is the writing you see when you hover your mouse over the URL portion of the site and CTR is the acronym for Click Through Rate.
When we type “bar girl in India”, we are getting multiple Quora pages on SERP using both Sonia Gandhi’s name and the word in the title of the page. Quora, like Reddit, is a very potent social media Q&A platform. Few examples of those titles are –
- Was Sonia Gandhi a bar dancer before marrying Rajiv?
- Was Sonia Gandhi really a waitress in a bar?
- Was Sonia Gandhi a bar dancer?
So here we can see ‘bar girl or dancer’ used with ‘Sonia Gandhi’ in the page title. Page title is the tag which search engine bots try to relate with the typed word in the search. When someone is searching the two terms together the engine bots bring up these question pages. Search engines automatically take into account both the page title and content as a reference before putting them on the Search Engine Ranking Pages.
Most importantly titles are visible to the audience so, when we click on any link from search result page google considers it relevant. The more frequently the page link is clicked CTR will be high for that page against this particular search term.
Here the titles are extensively used to raise the search rank accompanied by click through rate.
As political battles heat up around the world expect more such search manipulations. You may find your favorite politician associated with animals, cuss words, curses and poorer things. And it can come in any way.
But a serious word of caution. Manipulating search is a group activity. You, your reputation, or reputation of anybody can be damaged with targeted Google bombing or any other manipulations we discussed here. There are more ways. Let them remain hidden and take care. It is important to be careful in the cyber world.
The Obvious One 