An article in Medium (May 29, 2018), reprinted from the Washington Post, shows a new trick the political right uses to insinuate itself and its views into the minds of Internet users: gaming Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
Read the article and try it for yourself. Type “russia collusion delusion” into the three search engines. The result, while different on each search engine, carries the same message— the conservative-far right position that there was no collusion between Trump and the Russians.
People who perform research on the Internet rely heavily on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, on the reasonable assumption that each algorithm returns a representative sample of opinions and information. They are mistaken. When control of the nation and even the World is the prize, political parties as well as ambitious individuals will spend a lot of time and money attempting to fix the results of such ubiquitous and influential sources of information.
There are three remedies this writer can come up with: 1) users of search engines must get into the habit of not stopping after the first query, but continue, diversifying their queries in significant ways, so as to neutralize the efforts of parties gaming the system; 2) legislation to regulate the way the engines choose websites, so that gaming of all kinds is reduced to a tolerable level. This will not always be easy. Fox has the ability to direct millions of viewers to point their searches to sites it wishes to move higher up on the search engine rankings; or, 3) publicize what is happening. If enough users quit using the big three because they do not trust them, they will revise their search algorithms accordingly.
While I was engaged in writing the foregoing, it occurred to me that slight changes in a query to a search engine can produce large changes in the results, even when only synonyms are substituted for search terms. Try entering “Trump collusion” as compared to “Trump conspiracy. Then try ”Trump conspiracy Mercedes“ compaired to ”Trump conspiracy BMW.“ Now go way out and try ”Trump conspiracy Walrus“ and ”Trump Conspiracy octopus.“ The first item returned from the ”octopus“ query was from the LA Times, Mar 24, 2017: ”Is the Trump-Russia story an octopus or spaghetti?"
These examples, incidentally, were all from duckduckgo.com
Given results that remind one of the butterfly effect[1], it might be possible to develop a web browser plug-in that, after running an inputted query as entered, repeatedly makes intelligent modifications to the query and then runs it again and again. It might be worth trying out.
This is only partly in jest. Statisticians frequently use Monte Carlo methods in calculating frequency distributions; many times, it is the only way such distributions can even be calculated.
Think of all the headaches a working system like this would give to Google.
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The butterfly effect predicts that in a chaotic system, a tiny event (like the beating of a butterfly’s wings) can result in a hurricane far away. ↩
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