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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?

#31

Post by coldtea »

Rainymood wrote: post #13
rusk wrote: post #5

> 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.

>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 something specific and 3 years down the road it has not happened or been scheduled properly. That should be the bigger democratic scandal (in the real sense of the people's will being followed) than "the PM used a SEO phrase..."....

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

#32

Post by fangorn »

sincerely wrote: post #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…

"boris" "johnson" "fruit" hm, was it create or... cake?

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

#33

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

AznHisoka wrote: post #29

My respect level for Boris actually went up a few notches after reading about this :)

Indeed. The "lovable bumbling fool" image he puts across is a very conscious choice on his part. Despite what you think about his politics (and I'm personally not a fan) you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.

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

#34

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #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 fro…

DuckDuckGo is Bing without the tracking. Bing is generally a very good search engine, to be fair.

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

#36

Post by tiborsaas »

azangru wrote: post #15

While 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…

One one hand some might think that there's no "model case" if top 3 results don't mention anything on the subject. On the other hand, Android and Chrome mobile keeps suggesting articles based on my interest. If I follow brexit then this might pop up more so it could be used for subconscious manipulation even if I don't click just read the headline.

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

#37

Post by Tomte »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #19
7thaccount wrote: post #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

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.

This is not a Brexit discussion. It just happens to feature Boris Johnson.

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

#38

Post by olivierduval »

The 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 subject to moderation) or like FB is when deciding to NOT fact-check President obvious fake-news for the same reason ?

Maybe it's time to clearly distinguish 2 activities: search on one side, that has to be exhaustive, fact-checked, ranked by differences/complementarity (no use to show 10 times the same result, better to show 10 really different result with indication of common consensus) - and news of the day, where truth is much more "volatile" ?

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

#39

Post by petra »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #34
doctorpangloss wrote: post #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 fro…

DuckDuckGo is Bing without the tracking. Bing is generally a very good search engine, to be fair.

Does Bing shows better respect to search operators, than Google's attitude - "i already know what you want" ?
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