President Trump Accuses Google Of Rigging Results

[Rlilly]

In a series of Tweets, the President of the USA has accused Google of manipulating the Search Engine results against him:

"Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!

Is this possible?

Disclaimer: i am 100% apposed to this President on all levels.

[tangor]

The suppression of results is a common topic here at WW ... read any of the g forums for a zillion examples. Anyone who does not believe left leaning g might be tempted to use that power is just living in a personalized world. :)

Major tech mags, university studies, and think tanks have been expressing concerns for years ... and with the 2018 mid terms coming up it appears this is the year some of these suppression (serp demotion) tactics are being utilized. If your search results are not showing this then you are already affected by the suppression of THAT OTHER VOICE. Since that's personally okay for some they don't believe this stuff exists.

Since we are avoiding politics (ha ha! the subject line reveals all!) spend a week looking for the other side of things and see what happens. As I noted above, this is happening and at some future time the target might be something near and dear to the scoffers--and by the time they notice it will be too late.

As webmasters we have seen g in action, many of us for YEARS. The current scenario is no different than what we have experienced in the past ... just driven by a different ideology/purpose to achieve a goal that the block box does not want you to see.

Those who say an algo change is nothing, remember all the hundreds of thousands of website grave stones barnyard after barnyard for proof it exists.

[Marshall]

Fake News? There is a tweet on Trump's personal account showing a video stating that "For years, Google promoted President Obama's State of the Union Address. In 2017, they stopped." They have screen shots covering Jan 24, 2014 through Jan 12, 2016 showing a link stating "Live. Stream President Obama's State of the Union Address tonight..." The 2 subsequent screen shots from Feb 28, 2016 and Jan 30, 2018, show no such link.

If these screen shots were obtained from archive.org, the last 2 do not come up on archive.org. Yes, there is no link to live stream, but there are also no screen shots corresponding to the dates provided. Further, Google's home page in 2018 around the time of the screen shot in the video, had a tribute to Wilder Penfield's birthday, not the "generic" page you might see otherwise.

I bring this up as my first thought was (and still is) that the video is fake insofar as what it presents. No where have I been able to find screen shots like the last 2 in the video corresponding to the dates they are allegedly from. My point is, anything thing can be made to look "rigged." Take this whole thing with a grain of salt.

FYI - the video has been "pinned" on Trump's twitter account if you want to see it.

[iamlost]

I am not ready to believe in deliberate malfeasance on the part of G or B primarily because I never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity... which is, in SEs case, that their underlying algo is based on various permutations of popularity on top of various permutations of popularity. Thus most query results tend to be the voice of one side aka tyranny of the majority.

Other pov can usually be discerned but it typically requires careful query wording.

Yes, the SEs themselves are increasingly within their own filter bubbles.

GIGO

[Marshall]

Quick follow up. Seems they video on Trump's twitter feed showing Google's home page has been removed. I suspect it had to do with the fact the screen shots for no links to live stream his State of the Union where faked.

[Beachboy]

Google could use some competition. Trump says he's worth some $10 billion. Let him start his own search engine. Maybe call it "TrumpSeach." That way he can rig the results any way he likes. It would be interesting to see who, if anyone, would use it.

[lucy24]

It would be interesting to see who, if anyone, would use it.

<unavoidable digression>
There was once a story on Clients From Hell about a blogger who'd hired a developer to install analytics on her site. She then complained it wasn't working properly, because it never reported any human visits, even though her friends and family all assured her they read the blog faithfully every day.
</ud>

[EditorialGuy]

Mr. Trump should be happy with some of the top results on Yandex. Still, even that Russian search engine includes a few mainstream U.S. news sources along with RT and a couple of genuinely "fake news" sites with exact-match or nearly exact-match Trump domains.

[koan]

Trump is just an old man yelling at clouds. No one is more out of touch from current technology trends as elderly politicians. A week or two ago there was this republican accusing Twitter of censoring conservative views until people pointed out he did that himself in his settings, or something along these lines. If anything, Google nowadays is favoring corporate media over amateur independent web sites, that should please the pro big business party.

[goodroi]

Mods Note:The conversation is steering away from SEO so we are going to lock this thread. Thank you to everyone for contributing your SEO insights.

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