How Rick Santorum Is Making His "Google Problem" Worse
searchengineland.com
searchengineland.com
I think his politics are repugnant, but less than 1% of Google search queries for his name are looking for Dan Savage's prank. Google knows this. Google obsessively tweaks all manner of other links in the index. But Google's overall politics happen to be the same as my politics, so Santorum gets unequal access to the 2012 Internet.
Savage's prank actually discredits the Internet. Surely nobody's mind is going to be changed by that disgusting link. Instead, it just serves to associate Internet content with the culture wars. I don't think I'll upset too many HN'ers when I assert that the people most likely to be offended by that link are the people we'd most like finding better ways of informing themselves than talk radio.
Finally, and most obviously, we all happen to share the same sense of humor and political stance as today's Internet gatekeeper. But we are by no means assured of compatibility with the next one.
That "Santorum" link is perhaps the most notorious attempt ever to game Google's search rankings. Google should penalize the shit out of it.
The santorum definition is a media campaign, just like any other. I don't see why it should be penalized because it attempts to spread what some might consider the distatefullness of Santorum's political views.
You can call ANY attempt to game Google's SERPs a "media campaign, just like any other". Spam is spam.
[Citation: http://searchengineland.com/should-rick-santorums-google-pro... , about half way down]
Certainly.
Yes. The internet should work the same for everyone, whether they are running for president or are merely John Q. Citizen.
My guess is that since Google is in bed with the Obama administration, we would never see anything like this.
The majority of people are supporting it because they hate rick Santorum and don't want him to become president.
It also makes me question the validity of the opposition. Rather than trying to win with logic and reason, many resort to mud-slinging, rumors, and false information. Tactics I despise.
My hunch is correct (taken from the above poster): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/24/michelle-obama-phot...
This is an example of state-controlled media (IE: Google is in Bed with the Obama administration). How is this in any way okay?
Your guess is correct.
So the only motivation Google would have for penalizing the site is that it is the result of a smear campaign. And that sets a very dangerous precedent - for Google to identify and penalize sites based on intent or message would be censorship much worse than just allowing their algorithm to run its course.
The "dangerous precedent" you're talking about was set by the Google web spam team a long time ago.
Yep. If you wanted to look at one particular event, several years ago a major Nazi site ranked #1 for [Jew], because the people who care about [Jew] and were early adopters on the Internet happened to be Nazis. Google, at the time, refused to hand-edit that, and instead put PSA AdWords ads against the SERP for [Jew] saying "While we're certainly not Nazis, the algorithm decrees that the most relevant result for this search is, regrettably, a Nazi site." [Edit to add: Wow, the page did not linkrot: http://www.google.com/explanation.html ]This was a deeply controversial result internally and externally at the time.
Google 2012 is not Google 2002. Results which would get mentioned on the nightly news get fixed, period.
They're also (perhaps mostly) doing it to keep themselves out of the news, since the prevailing meme about that SERP now is "oh well, that's how the Internet works" and the result of a manual intervention would be a flood of news stories about an intervention Google probably doesn't want everyone knowing they do regularly.
I can't think of a single publication or media outlet that hasn't covered Santorum's "Google problem".
I disagree. We certainly like to fix bad results, but not manually. There's a very narrow range of things Google is willing to do manually in search. One of them is taking action on sites that are found to have violated the webmaster guidelines, but banning a result from a query just because it's embarrassing isn't something we do.
For instance, in that example you cite, jewwatch.com is still at number 2 for [jew].
And seriously, given that The Daily Show has pumped this gag several times (the Mitt Romney v. Santorum chocolate box thing last night being the latest), with its millions and millions of viewers, to say nothing of all the other publicity that this gag has gotten, I think it's reasonable to say that this "gag" -- the collective redefinition of the word Santorum in response to perceived bigotry -- is actually a bigger deal than Rick Santorum the (fringey, extreme, minor) Republican politician.
That would likely change if Santorum actually began to be a plausible contender for the presidential nomination, but that's extremely unlikely.
I think the maximum response from Google appropriate to this issue would be one of those explanatory disclaimers in the sidebar, like they put next to the photoshopped gorilla photo results when you image-searched for Michelle Obama.
Santorum has gone from being a fringe minor candidate to being the last conservative standard bearer with a shot. It may be temporary, but he lost the Iowa caucus by 8 votes (ie, essentially tied it).
Now if Santorum somehow went on to win, or even do well, in South Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida, and then several more states, then I'd be proved incorrect and at that point Mr. Santorum would probably be a bigger deal than grody-substance santorum. And, perhaps, Google's top search result might even organically change. But that's still exceedingly unlikely.
Not that I place too much stock in arbitrary futures markets, especially with regard to democratically-conducted elections, but Intrade's numbers are historically more predictive than what Iowa's ~120,000 Republican caucus-goers choose:
http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=69090...
But Google does police SERPs for shenanigans like this, and is deliberately not touching this one (for any of a variety of reasons, most of them not ideological).
All it takes is for Bing to be a little more lax about policing its SERPs for it to have the same result.
If I were Google's team I would kill this just because it looks very bad for Google. Let's assume Santorum goes on to win the Republican Primaries and then the Presidency. Is President Santorum going to be receptive or agressive if someone from Google (or the search industry in general) turns up on their doorstep?
It's the sort of thing that stays with people for a long time, rightly or wrongly.
This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known.
killing it would probably look even worse, as google would be attacked for censorship.
also, the site in question comes up first on bing, yahoo, and duckduckgo.
Screencapped: https://img.skitch.com/20120105-x7fb17is53yx99pw61bfur6g57.j...
edit: Ah ha, it only shows up if you have safe search off.
From what I recall, that googlebomb is widely believed to have been "defused" algorithmically, by devaluing anchor text which didn't match the target page at all (e.g, "miserable failure" didn't appear on GWB's page). Those measures only really defused googlebombs to unsuspecting sites; they wouldn't help for sites which are intentionally trying to rank for a term that they are relevant for!
So Google should start manually tweaking sites supporting public figures in order to garner favors from them in case they get in a position of power?
Talk about setting a bad precedent.
"This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known."
You're still missing the point. It should not be up to the search engine to do that: just let the search engine reflect what the web thinks.
No thanks.
My argument is that search engines of all stripes shouldn't allow themselves to host public pranks. That itself is a bad precedent.
Organising information is one thing - allowing pranksters to prank public figures is something else.
We might all laugh because we don't share the targets politics - but one day it will happen to someone we do support or care about.
Via algorithm or manual intervention? I thought they were dead set against manual tweaks. I imagine their todo list of algorithm improvements is never ending, so I'm not too quick to judge them on this.
It is a PR issue for Google, though. If someone is searching for Santorum, there's a pretty good chance they're a cultural conservative. When they see listings like this at the top of the search results, do they come away with a worse perception of Santorum or of Google? I wouldn't vote for Santorum, but I didn't really like seeing "frothy mix of lube and fecal matter". C'mon, Google, I just ate.
Which is to say: santorum is now a word in its own right. It's not a Google bomb in any sense: people can and do use it all the time to refer to the aforementioned substance. A month ago, that definition was definitely the more relevant, and five years from now, when the Santorum flash in the pan is over, that'll again become the most relevant item. What you're asking for is for Google to censor a word for the sake of a powerful man, who it happened to be named after.
The fact that this particular association is notorious almost entirely on the Internet, and that any notoriety it has achieved outside the Internet falls directly from its success on the Internet... well, that's not relevant. We have always used the word santorum as a common noun.
I think a lot of the distaste people have for santorum is that there was an active campaign to coin and propagate it. But lots of words have that heritage: if someone looks up "pegging" on Google, no one gets upset when it turns out to be an invented but widely adopted sex term.
Savage's hostile intent, though, has a major role in people thinking santorum's an illegitimate word, even though no one can point to any real metric by which Santorum should trump santorum; we all like to feign genteel shock at crassness. But we can't let our emotions, be they anti-Santorum or anti-Savage, dictate whether Google should manually intervene to change the ordering of the search. That road leads to 1984.
I believe Congressman Santorum screwed up big time and now has something moderately well known named after him. Such is life. The substance is literally called that now. Tough luck for the politician.
edit: I guess people understandably think I'm trying to start a reddit pun thread or something. My point is that there is a long history of this happening. Google delisting this isn't going to change the term now.
Samuel Mudd is sometimes given as the origin of the phrase "your name is mud", as in, for example, the 2007 film National Treasure: Book of Secrets. However, according to an online etymology dictionary, this phrase has its earliest known recorded instance in 1823, ten years before Mudd's birth, and is based on an obsolete sense of the word "mud" meaning "a stupid twaddling fellow".[18][19]
The point is, the Google bomb isn't the only "artifact" of Dan Savage's campaign. If this association were something that only existed in Google's SERPs I would be more inclined to agree with your point, but it's not. Google is not the only thing, and arguably not even the biggest or most important thing, that was affected. The association with the term is real, for a very real and meaningful sense of the word "real."
Now, I will agree that the association is over-valued due to the Google-bombing, and most users this month are better served by politician than the term in the results page right now, but that's an issue of poorly-ranked results, rather than artificially-constructed results, which is qualitatively less troubling.
If Vidkun Quisling were alive today, would he have a legitimate complaint against Google if searches for his name brought up the dictionary definition I just quoted?
If "Quisling" meant "a man in drag", "pile of manure" or something less tasteful then you may have a point.
Yeah, it happens.
How do you feel about terms less mean-spirited like the "Arab Spring?"
(a) Google believes that most of its users really are looking for Dan Savage's prank when they search for the name of one of the best-known national Republican figures of the last 30 years.
(b) Google is deliberately choosing not to adjust this particular search result for reasons of ideology or pragmatism.
Please understand that I could give a rats about Rick Santorum. I find him odious. I firmly hope he does win the GOP nom so that Obama can win 2012 in a walk.
But [santorum] does not return that particular SERP because the word "Santorum" organically became associated with that particular idea. A group of people decided to rewire, well I guess the Internet, to force that association. If they can do it, anyone else can too. Google's search results should be more credible than that.
Not sure I believe that all the people at Google involved in deciding how search results get tweaked lean the same way politically and are interested in having their ideology reflected in Google results.
That's kind of what you're implying here isn't it?
I think the overall argument we're seeing here is fundamentally the same as those questions about sexism in the tech industry.
Some believe its just a reflection of the fact that most people in that group happen to fit into a certain demographic and that nothing is really broken. Others believe there's a fundamental underlying problem that needs to be fixed.
Santorum is a 2-term Senator who ran poorly for president a couple times, and who was made mildly more famous due to a minor controversy. He's like the Gary Hart of the GOP.
Meanwhile, Google most assuredly does have signals as to which of the results on that first SERP are the ones users are actually looking for.
I think enough of them are that it justifies the prank being among the top results.
Yes, and the spreading santorum site is the first result. So unless you have some actual counterproof, I think the reasonable assumption is that Google is giving the people what they ask for, as usual. Especially since Bing returns the same top result.
Anyway, the whole thesis of this thread is factually wrong, since the top result today on Google for "santorum" is actually the Iowa caucus results table from the Associated Press. So Google has, in fact, manually inserted a search result in response to the surge in interest in Santorum the candidate. (Bing, by the way, has not.)
Here's Google's response on this issue from back in September, after Santorum requested the result be removed: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63952.html
"Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the web."
Should they be editing out search results where people say they intend to "Xerox" things instead of photocopy them? Same sort of neologism.
(Yes, I get that this was an intentional GoogleBomb, but it has gone beyond that and is now the meaning of the substance).
Disagreeing with a position held by 40% of people != irrational hate speech towards 10% of people.
Obviously, a view isn't made more correct by having more people believe in it, but if one makes entirely baseless attacks on a large demographic, and that demographic responds, I find it hard to be sympathetic.
The issue with the argument is that normal people don't work in real, crazy absolutes. That's a certain type of technical person thing. Normal people don't get to Richard Stallman levels of consistency in action. They stop their environmentalism at perhaps picking up some trash or buying a Prius, maybe even bringing bags to the grocery store, they stop their pro-choice stance at perhaps sending a check to the tax deductible (aka, non-political) branch of Planned Parenthood
Google WILL eventually stop this sort of thing if it becomes pervasive. When it's isolated, and arguable that it shouldn't be fixed, they likely will not fix it.
It isn't like Google lets the billions of spam blogs effect search results when they can detect it's going on. They did at first, but once it became a problem distorting results, they stopped.
I get that you're trying to loudly assert "BUT THAT LINE HAS BEEN CROSSED", and the rest of us are pointing out that "that's debatable; Google surely will figure something out when it's and issue that's very clean cut".
Would you likely see action faster if were say, a conservative renaming of the liquid made after an abortion? Perhaps, due to those political leanings you ascribe to googlers. But will it stop for "left wing" terms eventually as well? Surely.
There are strong engineering reasons to not point-fix stuff. Maybe in this case there are stronger legal/political/PR reasons to get any fix at all out quickly. There certainly wouldn't have been any 2 weeks ago, when Santorum was still an also-ran.
Now that there are two definitions of Santorum, why should google favor one over the other?
I also think that your description of the smear campaign as an attempt to game Google is misleading. It is fundamentally an attempt to add a new word to the English language. It seems to be working pretty well. Getting it to rank high on Google isn't an attempt to game Google, it's an attempt to create a new word.
edit: I misread this:
> I also think that your description of the smear
> campaign as an attempt to game Google is misleading.
How do you know this?
The real problem here is Santorum's insane ideas and forcing his delusional beliefs on the public. Thus the Internet public has chosen to redefine his name as cultural slang. For Google to censor this would be simply wrong.
I'd be surprised if there weren't a large number of searches resulting from "hehe, if you Google for Santorum this really funny page comes up".
When you say: I think his politics are repugnant, but less than 1% of Google search queries for his name are looking for Dan Savage's prank.
I am sure this is true today but I think it was definitely not true a month ago, and a year ago the opposite would probably be true. The difference between this and other Google bombs is that people really do the word Santorum in everyday conversation. (Well, perhaps not 'everyday', but definitely in contexts unconnected to Google search results and with the alternate definition of the term in mind.) I would expect that most people searching for "Santorum" before 2011 probably heard the word in that context and are wondering what it means.
I think the irony of deliberately re-engineering "language" in the name of "free speech" is lost on a lot of HN readers. It seems to me like almost the definition of Orwellianism. We're just not freaked out because we don't like homophobes.
We have always used the word santorum to refer to excreta. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
I doubt if Google are manipulating their search engine results based on a dislike of Santorum; do you have any evidence otherwise?
> Savage's prank actually discredits the Internet. Surely nobody's mind is going to be changed by that disgusting link. Instead, it just serves to associate Internet content with the culture wars.
The internet contains the totality of the uhman experience, so it is associated with the culture wars (and with everything else humans do).
> Google should penalize the shit out of it.
It should be up to Google how they run their website, provided they doing do anythning dishonest.
I wouldn't want Google to attempt to squelch the culture wars, but I would hope that Google wouldn't allow themselves to become a part of the culture wars.
I don't think Google is being dishonest.
which boils down to trust (in Google results) and free speech/censorship
Now if content farms, SEO or other forms of manipulation are involved then I agree 100% with you.
But I don't like the idea of a corporation suppressing a popular cause, which is really what this is.
Is there evidence of a real SEO type manipulation going on here? If so, your point would be a lot stronger if you provided some links (I am going on the principle that the accuser should provide the evidence which is why I haven't provided evidence of the nonexistence of manipulation).
I would sincerely like to know if there is evidence of widespread manipulation of search results here.
Spreadingsantorum.com has relevant, keyword-dense content and a substantial number of high-quality links, more than enough to outweigh any possible penalty for the hokey googlebombing links. By almost any SEO criterion I am aware of, it beats ricksantorum.com by a country mile. If Rick Santorum wants to solve his Google problem, he needs to play the game like anyone else - add quality content and build quality links.
For Google to manipulate these SERPs in the interests of propriety or prudishness would be absurd. They have an explicitly stated policy of ranking based on their algorithm, with the exception of webspam. Tinkering with results manually is a can of worms they have no interest in opening. They've stuck to their guns on much thornier problems than this.
Ouch. I don't think that is even remotely possible.
I'm not trying to dissuade you from your disgust, but try to appreciate that not everyone shares your values.
Today, people are searching because he's literally front page news. This would seem to be an example of Google not keeping up with real-time events.
OTOH, in a few months or even weeks he'll probably be out of the race, so reversion to the mean seems likely.
(And nothing definite can be said about what the intent was in the time before that.)
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=santorum
Hard to tell if it's an intentional, exceptional tweak - it could be, but it could also be a general rule along the lines of 'if there's a lot of news and it's a person in Wikipedia, lead with Wikipedia and then show the news.'
Either way, it's smart.
From what I've read, the site which has given Santorum a meaning have made the demand that he stops talking negatively about homosexuals. If he does, the site will go away. This makes me think, even though I somehow think he deserves it: Isn't this essentially against free speech? Forcing someone to censor their opinions through non-violent troublemaking?
I probably didn't manage to phrase that well-enough to please anyone, but at least I've voiced my concerns.
This is exactly how the freedom of speech is meant to work.
No, I don't support Rick. He's worthless..