I found this interesting article on Gwen Harris’s blog, Internet News.
Manipulation of search results
Is Search A Lie? Can You Really Believe Google? Bruce Nussbaum, Business Week (February 08)
Can a PR firm manipulate results at Google (and other search engines) to the degree that this man claimed?
“I sat next to a a guy I’ve know for years from a major public relations/media relations firm at the World Economic Forum in Davos two weeks ago and he told me how his company manipulated search to improve the image of its clients.”
One commenter advised, “… growing need for people to understand the difference between legitimate search results and PR-fueled, or otherwise manipulated, search results.”
Yes, but identifying these results usually takes a fair amount of subject knowledge and awareness of techniques to notice the signs of the gamed results. No wonder people trust search results less .
The last link leads to an article about search atheism, a term I could learn to love.
To quote Phil Bradley, “Of course companies and individuals try and game the search engine, and anyone who blindly accepts results without analyzing them deserves what they get.”
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