The level of paranoia in the Twitter thread is worrying...
Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
21–30 of 290 posts
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#22The 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 fro…
> its results are such garbage
Whenever people complain about DDG's search results I am always a bit baffled. It works 95% of the time for me and that 5% is occurs when I am searching for the answer to some obscure bug. I know this is your word against mine but "garbage" is a bit of an exaggeration.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#23The 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 fro…
Yahoo doesn't have its own crawler for years now. Both of them are Bing under the hood: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2217.html
I still prefer my Bing results without personalization, so I use DDG.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#24While fascinating, if this is a deliberate strategy, I wonder what its intended effect is supposed to be. Are people curious enough to google for stories about Johnson's alleged affair with the American woman going to be satisfied with the "model of restraint" quote? Are they going to forget what they have just been searching for, get immediately distracted and go read what this model of restraint business is all abo…
If I committed murder and wanted to hide the body, I would hide it on Page 2 of the search results. No one goes there. After all, if the first x results are not what you were looking for, how likely is it that the next x results will provide a match?
That's totally fair if the user doesn't know what they are searching for (e.g. if the only search criterion is Boris Johnson); but if they already know that there is a body; if they have already heard about the model (or the bus), how likely are they to be put off the scent by irrelevant search results?
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#25This 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…
Makes me wonder what Jean-Claude Junker, head of the EU, is hiding now when he came out with the bizarre statement "he did not have an erotic relationship with the Irish Backstop".
Anyone know?
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#26They 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
Thing that got me was the bus thing was "spiritually" true. The UK does send a fortune to the EU, and the EU will not spend it on the NHS. At best they may use it to resurface a road in the UK in some town no one has ever heard of along with a "eu project" propoganda badge. But the spirit of the message held water, even if it wasnt technically true during tuesday of the second easter of a red moon.
It is also "spiritually" true that you send a fortune to food producers.
Put that way, you focus on the price but not the benefits.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I committed murder and wanted to hide the body, I would hide it on Page 2 of the search results. No one goes there. After all, if the first x results are not what you were looking for, how likely is it that the next x results will provide a match?
That's totally fair if the user doesn't know what they are searching for (e.g. if the only search criterion is Boris Johnson); but if they already know that there is a body; if they have already heard about the model (or the bus), how likely are they to be put off the scent by irrelevant search results?
If you are already convinced that something is going on, then this will not throw you off, no.
But if you are indifferent to the matter, then you will most likely quickly give up, thinking that it can't be that important if it's not in the top search results.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#28> I wonder why nobody else is willing to do this? Because it makes you look like a fool. Doesn’t mean it won’t work though. Bojo apparently targetting the segment for whom this kind thing goes over their heads
Then I'd argue that we are the greater fools for letting this happen without any consequences. Personally I think this is a genius move by Bojo and something that should be applauded by hackers (this is Hacker News after all). It literally hacks the system, and I think it's beautiful.
It's genius in the same way as crawling over websites looking for a 90s relic to inject "DROP TABLE IF EXISTS x;". Personally I don't deem anything genius simply on the merit that "it works".
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#29My respect level for Boris actually went up a few notches after reading about this :)
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#30Maybe he's trying to hide potential results from "Boris Johnson restraint"
Now get that image out of your mind. ;)