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Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?

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Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?

#3
This is actually fascinating (even if it may not be the behavior we expect from our elected leaders). He did the same thing in June where he gave a completely baffling interview [1] about how his hobby was painting models of buses out of used fruit crates.

But people suspected [2] then that it might be a similar strategy, to monopolize the results for "boris johnson bus" searches.

I wonder why nobody else is willing to do this? It seems like it works, and it keeps you in the news...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLcCZjDoWTQ

[2] https://gizmodo.com/did-boris-johnson-ramble-about-model-bus...

Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?

#4
They talked about this on John Olliver. They had a bizarre interview where he brought up a story about a bus and people think it is to salt the keywords of Google search to not show a campaign bus that highlighted something like free health care or something like that.

Edit: user "sincerely" has a better description and links

Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?

#8
I'm shocked that this works on a technical level, simply because a lot of words we use are ambiguous, so Google's algorithms are impressively good at picking up what we're really searching for.

I'm constantly amazed to see the correct search results, and almost never have to add clarifying terms, even when I have to admit that I am being quite ambiguous.

So I never would have expected this to be possible, let alone exploitable.

Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?

#9
The funnier thing to me is the people in the thread talking about how DuckDuckGo finds the "right" results.

DuckDuckGo is just Yahoo. I think the results are something like 99.9% the same, so whatever is the 0.1% they add, when I did the search, it results in maybe a slight difference in link ordering.

The reason it finds the "right" results is also the same reason its results are such garbage. And this is coming from someone whose default search is DuckDuckGo.

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