Yet another reason we need synonym-aware search. Google should do nlp to find which "model" is being used in the page and then ask you which one you meant.
Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
81–90 of 290 posts
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think. In playing the political game at least, definitely so. Lots of reports from coworkers (especially from the Foreign Office) that he is genuinely as clueless as he comes across when it comes to other elements of his job.
The news story that really made me believe that the bumbling fool shtick is real and not just an act was when he went to a buddhist temple in Myanmar and started reciting a colonial-era Kipling poem about a British soldier reminiscing about a Burmese girl that he kissed - until the ambassador intervened and told him it wasn't appropriate. If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wa…
"A Well-trained Idiot" describes the British Etonian elite so concisely I think it should become a technical term. Well done.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#83My respect level for Boris actually went up a few notches after reading about this :)
Perhaps it's just a new thing invented by PR coaches.
Anyway, I hope that Google fixes this kind of SEO.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think. In playing the political game at least, definitely so. Lots of reports from coworkers (especially from the Foreign Office) that he is genuinely as clueless as he comes across when it comes to other elements of his job.
The news story that really made me believe that the bumbling fool shtick is real and not just an act was when he went to a buddhist temple in Myanmar and started reciting a colonial-era Kipling poem about a British soldier reminiscing about a Burmese girl that he kissed - until the ambassador intervened and told him it wasn't appropriate. If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wa…
> If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem.
That's exactly why he did it. He's a nasty, vindictive, racist colonialist.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#85Wouldn't this require him to know how he is going to be quoted in advance? Should everyone be so readily accepting that this is some genius level of foresight?
It's hardly genius and it's hardly coming from Boris.
His press team will have told him to drop in particular words or phrases repeatedly - if we hear it once, he has probably said it multiple times.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#86This 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…
I suspect it's the work of Grant Shapps: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/grant-shapps-..., a known SEO spammer.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#87The most worrying for me? Even after countless updates to their algorithms, breakthrough AI and ML, breaking hundred of thousands of legit website each time, Google is still dumb enough to be tricked by such a simplistic tactics :-( Or is Google biased toward "official" speech (even from a really-not-trustable source) like Twitter is when it will allow BS from a President (because it's an official account so not subj…
Google cannot figure out which news items are more subjectively relevant for every individual. Any system with rules and emerging behaviour will be game-able by simple analysing what goes in and what comes out. There is no solution to this problem.
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#88My respect level for Boris actually went up a few notches after reading about this :)
this would be 4.5D smartz
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#89This is just silly. The last thing anyone would know about Arcuri is that she was very briefly a model. It would be like searching for info about (UK supreme court president) Lady Hale by Googling “barmaid”. Try instead searching for “Boris Johnson technology lessons”, or indeed “Boris Johnson thigh”. Has his team SEO’d that yet?
> The last thing anyone would know about Arcuri is that she was very briefly a model.
Sky News: "Boris Johnson: 'No interest to declare' over links with former model Jennifer Arcuri"
The Mirror: "Boris Johnson 'had affair with ex-model Jennifer Arcuri while London mayor'"
The Sun: "Who is Jennifer Arcuri? Model connected to Boris Johnson"
The Independent: "Jennifer Arcuri: Boris Johnson repeatedly refuses to deny affair with ex-model awarded public funds and access"
Re: Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then I'd argue that we are the greater fools for letting this happen without any consequences. Letting what exactly happen? Him using a phrase that might or might not have been intended to make a previous story fall in search results? As if the original story about the model could not still be in the front pages of newspapers and websites, and so on? That's not even half an accusation... The public voted for someth…
"The public voted for something specific and 3 years down the road it has not happened or been scheduled properly. That should be the bigger democratic scandal" The public did not vote for something specific - they voted for something very vague and ill defined, the little information they were provided was incorrect (e.g. "an extra £350m a week for the NHS"), nobody had anything even approaching a plan, the whole th…
> they voted for something very vague and ill defined
Utter tosh. The consequences of a Leave vote were hammered out by Remain-supporting politicians for weeks and weeks before the referendum. The government spent 9 million GBP to publish a leaflet in support of Remain which went to every household in the UK, before the referendum.
Claiming that no one knew what a Leave vote meant, is gaslighting in the extreme.