I find the Santorum "Google Problem" disquieting, to say the least.
I think his politics are repugnant, but less than 1% of Google search queries for his name are looking for Dan Savage's prank. Google knows this. Google obsessively tweaks all manner of other links in the index. But Google's overall politics happen to be the same as my politics, so Santorum gets unequal access to the 2012 Internet.
Savage's prank actually discredits the Internet. Surely nobody's mind is going to be changed by that disgusting link. Instead, it just serves to associate Internet content with the culture wars. I don't think I'll upset too many HN'ers when I assert that the people most likely to be offended by that link are the people we'd most like finding better ways of informing themselves than talk radio.
Finally, and most obviously, we all happen to share the same sense of humor and political stance as today's Internet gatekeeper. But we are by no means assured of compatibility with the next one.
That "Santorum" link is perhaps the most notorious attempt ever to game Google's search rankings. Google should penalize the shit out of it.
I would agree with you, except it's not one company or person gaming google. Thousands of different internet users have linked his name to the gag site. The reason it's at the top is that it legitimately IS the center of the web of links for the keyword "Santorum." The links driving the popularity of the site are not from content farms or SEO networks, but legitimate blogs, tweets and articles. It's not a result of SEO gaming, but a genuine internet-wide smear campaign (which of course is reflected on Google).
So the only motivation Google would have for penalizing the site is that it is the result of a smear campaign. And that sets a very dangerous precedent - for Google to identify and penalize sites based on intent or message would be censorship much worse than just allowing their algorithm to run its course.
Google already states its intention to tune its SERPs so that they answer the questions users likely intend to pose when they type a search in. Google is already in the business of judging search intent.
The "dangerous precedent" you're talking about was set by the Google web spam team a long time ago.
The "dangerous precedent" you're talking about was set by the Google web spam team a long time ago.
Yep. If you wanted to look at one particular event, several years ago a major Nazi site ranked #1 for [Jew], because the people who care about [Jew] and were early adopters on the Internet happened to be Nazis. Google, at the time, refused to hand-edit that, and instead put PSA AdWords ads against the SERP for [Jew] saying "While we're certainly not Nazis, the algorithm decrees that the most relevant result for this search is, regrettably, a Nazi site." [Edit to add: Wow, the page did not linkrot: http://www.google.com/explanation.html ]This was a deeply controversial result internally and externally at the time.
Google 2012 is not Google 2002. Results which would get mentioned on the nightly news get fixed, period.
Google 2012 is not Google 2002. Results which would get mentioned on the nightly news get fixed, period.
I disagree. We certainly like to fix bad results, but not manually. There's a very narrow range of things Google is willing to do manually in search. One of them is taking action on sites that are found to have violated the webmaster guidelines, but banning a result from a query just because it's embarrassing isn't something we do.
For instance, in that example you cite, jewwatch.com is still at number 2 for [jew].
I concede immediately that I'm oversimplifying the issue. Google doesn't keep the "problem" Santorum result at the top of the SERP simply because they don't like Rick Santorum.
They're also (perhaps mostly) doing it to keep themselves out of the news, since the prevailing meme about that SERP now is "oh well, that's how the Internet works" and the result of a manual intervention would be a flood of news stories about an intervention Google probably doesn't want everyone knowing they do regularly.
I'm not sure whether he is right ,but I think that's his point(ie he believes that most similar problems get special tweaking and Santorum doeesn't for whatever reason)
Well, I (of course) cannot speak for the general google using population, but the few times I have ever googled santorum it has been to show people the gag results.
That's the only reason anybody I know that has ever googled "Santorum" also.
And seriously, given that The Daily Show has pumped this gag several times (the Mitt Romney v. Santorum chocolate box thing last night being the latest), with its millions and millions of viewers, to say nothing of all the other publicity that this gag has gotten, I think it's reasonable to say that this "gag" -- the collective redefinition of the word Santorum in response to perceived bigotry -- is actually a bigger deal than Rick Santorum the (fringey, extreme, minor) Republican politician.
That would likely change if Santorum actually began to be a plausible contender for the presidential nomination, but that's extremely unlikely.
I think the maximum response from Google appropriate to this issue would be one of those explanatory disclaimers in the sidebar, like they put next to the photoshopped gorilla photo results when you image-searched for Michelle Obama.
You might want to read up on the developments of the last 24 hours.
Santorum has gone from being a fringe minor candidate to being the last conservative standard bearer with a shot. It may be temporary, but he lost the Iowa caucus by 8 votes (ie, essentially tied it).
I do know about the Iowa caucus outcome, but I don't think it says much about Santorum's chance of becoming the Republican party nominee.
Now if Santorum somehow went on to win, or even do well, in South Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida, and then several more states, then I'd be proved incorrect and at that point Mr. Santorum would probably be a bigger deal than grody-substance santorum. And, perhaps, Google's top search result might even organically change. But that's still exceedingly unlikely.
Not that I place too much stock in arbitrary futures markets, especially with regard to democratically-conducted elections, but Intrade's numbers are historically more predictive than what Iowa's ~120,000 Republican caucus-goers choose:
I'm not disputing the fact that the "problem" link landed at the top of [santorum] organically and algorithmically. Of course it did. Google didn't stick it at the top of the SERP.
But Google does police SERPs for shenanigans like this, and is deliberately not touching this one (for any of a variety of reasons, most of them not ideological).
All it takes is for Bing to be a little more lax about policing its SERPs for it to have the same result.
I consider the official definition of the word "Santorum" to be on SpreadingSantorum.com, and I suspect that many other people do as well. Why should Google try to project an alternate reality, just because Rick doesn't like it?
Didn't Google kill the 'miserable failure' google bomb of years ago?
If I were Google's team I would kill this just because it looks very bad for Google. Let's assume Santorum goes on to win the Republican Primaries and then the Presidency. Is President Santorum going to be receptive or agressive if someone from Google (or the search industry in general) turns up on their doorstep?
It's the sort of thing that stays with people for a long time, rightly or wrongly.
This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known.
> Didn't Google kill the 'miserable failure' google bomb of years ago?
From what I recall, that googlebomb is widely believed to have been "defused" algorithmically, by devaluing anchor text which didn't match the target page at all (e.g, "miserable failure" didn't appear on GWB's page). Those measures only really defused googlebombs to unsuspecting sites; they wouldn't help for sites which are intentionally trying to rank for a term that they are relevant for!
"This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known."
> This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known
You're still missing the point. It should not be up to the search engine to do that: just let the search engine reflect what the web thinks.
I just searched "Santorum" on DDG, and every result for the first few screens is in fact about Rick Santorum the politician and not about that disgusting definition.
Maybe Google should follow suit and flag the "santorum" site as requiring safe search. It does focus on sexual content, after all, and this way they don't have to tweak their algorithm.
The "miserable failure" bomb was a different issue that exposed a problem with their algorithm, which was associating search terms with a web page even though that page had nothing to do with the keywords. In this case the search term and web page are sympatico.
I don't think Google should censor their search results to get on the good side of a politician. Google's mission is to organize information, not to satisfy lawmakers.
Another example to read the comment fully:
"This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known."
Organising information is one thing - allowing pranksters to prank public figures is something else.
We might all laugh because we don't share the targets politics - but one day it will happen to someone we do support or care about.
Also please read the comment fully:
"This isn't a plea to treat all potential presidents with kid gloves, it's a plea to make sure that pranks against public figures of all kinds are squashed once they become known."
My argument is that search engines of all stripes shouldn't allow themselves to host public pranks. That itself is a bad precedent.
I didn't know "Santorum" was a guy's name until years after it became a name for the sex term.
I believe Congressman Santorum screwed up big time and now has something moderately well known named after him. Such is life. The substance is literally called that now. Tough luck for the politician.
edit: I guess people understandably think I'm trying to start a reddit pun thread or something. My point is that there is a long history of this happening. Google delisting this isn't going to change the term now.
Samuel Mudd is sometimes given as the origin of the phrase "your name is mud", as in, for example, the 2007 film National Treasure: Book of Secrets. However, according to an online etymology dictionary, this phrase has its earliest known recorded instance in 1823, ten years before Mudd's birth, and is based on an obsolete sense of the word "mud" meaning "a stupid twaddling fellow".[18][19]
Dan Savage didn't just make this change on Google, he actually made the change on the English language as a whole. Santorum is the only name for the substance, and there are large groups of people who are aware of the neologism but do are not (or were not) aware of the person or the history of the term. Santorum is just as valid as any other neologism that's been around and alive for the better part of a decade.
The point is, the Google bomb isn't the only "artifact" of Dan Savage's campaign. If this association were something that only existed in Google's SERPs I would be more inclined to agree with your point, but it's not. Google is not the only thing, and arguably not even the biggest or most important thing, that was affected. The association with the term is real, for a very real and meaningful sense of the word "real."
Now, I will agree that the association is over-valued due to the Google-bombing, and most users this month are better served by politician than the term in the results page right now, but that's an issue of poorly-ranked results, rather than artificially-constructed results, which is qualitatively less troubling.
You're absolutely correct, and this is by no means the first time that a word has been coined as the result of people being upset with a politician. The word 'quisling' means "A traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying their country", and it was coined by The Times in Britain in reference to Norwegian Vidkun Quisling, who helped the Nazis conquer his country.
If Vidkun Quisling were alive today, would he have a legitimate complaint against Google if searches for his name brought up the dictionary definition I just quoted?
"Quisler" is a non-sequiter. Quisling was a quisler and Obama championed obamacare and Savage wanted to create a vulgar definition of a man's name. One of those is not like the other...
If "Quisling" meant "a man in drag", "pile of manure" or something less tasteful then you may have a point.
Changed the English language? I'd never heard of this guy (Savage) or this definition of "santorum" until today. Merriam-Webster doesn't know of it either.
Just like Obama pissed off Rush Limbaugh so the current health care reform law (which is well over 50% republican originated ideas), is called Obamacare?
I kind of see where you are coming from, but I'm not sure what your ultimate point is. It sounds like you want search engines to modify results so that activists can't create meanings like Obamacare or Santorum. In order to do that they would need to control the way language changes over time to keep that from happening.
How do you feel about terms less mean-spirited like the "Arab Spring?"
You don't get it. Google routinely modifies search results. There isn't a coherent "algorithm" that determines all SERPs. The whole site is carefully calibrated to adjust to user expectations. I think that gives you a choice of two conclusions:
(a) Google believes that most of its users really are looking for Dan Savage's prank when they search for the name of one of the best-known national Republican figures of the last 30 years.
(b) Google is deliberately choosing not to adjust this particular search result for reasons of ideology or pragmatism.
Please understand that I could give a rats about Rick Santorum. I find him odious. I firmly hope he does win the GOP nom so that Obama can win 2012 in a walk.
But [santorum] does not return that particular SERP because the word "Santorum" organically became associated with that particular idea. A group of people decided to rewire, well I guess the Internet, to force that association. If they can do it, anyone else can too. Google's search results should be more credible than that.
The answer is obviously (a). But Rick Santorum is hardly "one of the best-known national Republican figures of the last 30 years." I'd put on that list people like Reagan, George HW Bush, George W Bush, Cheney, Powell, McCain, Limbaugh, Gingrich, etc. That fact that you'd even think to put Sen. Santorum in that company inclines me to question your judgment.
Santorum is a 2-term Senator who ran poorly for president a couple times, and who was made mildly more famous due to a minor controversy. He's like the Gary Hart of the GOP.
You think that of all the searches across the country for [santorum], most of them are for the prank? That strains credibility. I get that virtually no HN'ers are naturally interested in ultra-right wing conservative Republican politics, but let me assure you that approximately half the whole country is, and even the most conservative among them have net access.
Meanwhile, Google most assuredly does have signals as to which of the results on that first SERP are the ones users are actually looking for.
> Google most assuredly does have signals as to which of the results on that first SERP are the ones users are actually looking for.
Yes, and the spreading santorum site is the first result. So unless you have some actual counterproof, I think the reasonable assumption is that Google is giving the people what they ask for, as usual. Especially since Bing returns the same top result.
Anyway, the whole thesis of this thread is factually wrong, since the top result today on Google for "santorum" is actually the Iowa caucus results table from the Associated Press. So Google has, in fact, manually inserted a search result in response to the surge in interest in Santorum the candidate. (Bing, by the way, has not.)
Google is deliberately choosing not to adjust this particular search result for reasons of ideology or pragmatism
Not sure I believe that all the people at Google involved in deciding how search results get tweaked lean the same way politically and are interested in having their ideology reflected in Google results.
That's kind of what you're implying here isn't it?
I think the overall argument we're seeing here is fundamentally the same as those questions about sexism in the tech industry.
Some believe its just a reflection of the fact that most people in that group happen to fit into a certain demographic and that nothing is really broken. Others believe there's a fundamental underlying problem that needs to be fixed.
While these things are created to injure and tarnish reputations (and I think they are generally mean spirited), they're a feature of language, not google.
Should they be editing out search results where people say they intend to "Xerox" things instead of photocopy them? Same sort of neologism.
(Yes, I get that this was an intentional GoogleBomb, but it has gone beyond that and is now the meaning of the substance).
>No. Santorum screwed up by defaming 10 percent of the people on Earth, who replied in kind. Dan Savage just got them organised.
Disagreeing with a position held by 40% of people != irrational hate speech towards 10% of people.
Obviously, a view isn't made more correct by having more people believe in it, but if one makes entirely baseless attacks on a large demographic, and that demographic responds, I find it hard to be sympathetic.
You have it backwards. I'm not chastising people for disagreeing with pro-lifers. I'm not pro-life. I'm saying that 40% of America hold a militant viewpoint in direct conflict with most of HN'ers. So when you say, "well, that's what happens when you offend 10% of the world's population", I'm saying you should bear in mind that much larger factions are much angrier about beliefs you hold.
I get your argument (Which is "What about that slippery slope!!!")
The issue with the argument is that normal people don't work in real, crazy absolutes. That's a certain type of technical person thing. Normal people don't get to Richard Stallman levels of consistency in action. They stop their environmentalism at perhaps picking up some trash or buying a Prius, maybe even bringing bags to the grocery store, they stop their pro-choice stance at perhaps sending a check to the tax deductible (aka, non-political) branch of Planned Parenthood
Google WILL eventually stop this sort of thing if it becomes pervasive. When it's isolated, and arguable that it shouldn't be fixed, they likely will not fix it.
It isn't like Google lets the billions of spam blogs effect search results when they can detect it's going on. They did at first, but once it became a problem distorting results, they stopped.
I get that you're trying to loudly assert "BUT THAT LINE HAS BEEN CROSSED", and the rest of us are pointing out that "that's debatable; Google surely will figure something out when it's and issue that's very clean cut".
Would you likely see action faster if were say, a conservative renaming of the liquid made after an abortion? Perhaps, due to those political leanings you ascribe to googlers. But will it stop for "left wing" terms eventually as well? Surely.
I live in the UK. Literally the only thing I know about Rick Santorum is that he is a homophobic bigot, and the only reason I know that is because of the Santorum neologism. The same goes for the people around me. In my experience, outside of the US "Santorum" is an internet joke first and a politician second. The word "Santorum" is a bona fide cultural phenomenon, whereas until a few weeks ago the man Rick Santorum was just a crank ex-Senator taking a shot at the primaries.
Spreadingsantorum.com has relevant, keyword-dense content and a substantial number of high-quality links, more than enough to outweigh any possible penalty for the hokey googlebombing links. By almost any SEO criterion I am aware of, it beats ricksantorum.com by a country mile. If Rick Santorum wants to solve his Google problem, he needs to play the game like anyone else - add quality content and build quality links.
For Google to manipulate these SERPs in the interests of propriety or prudishness would be absurd. They have an explicitly stated policy of ranking based on their algorithm, with the exception of webspam. Tinkering with results manually is a can of worms they have no interest in opening. They've stuck to their guns on much thornier problems than this.
I think the only problem here is that Google isn't updating fast enough to reflect an increased interest in Santorum the person.
When you say: I think his politics are repugnant, but less than 1% of Google search queries for his name are looking for Dan Savage's prank.
I am sure this is true today but I think it was definitely not true a month ago, and a year ago the opposite would probably be true. The difference between this and other Google bombs is that people really do the word Santorum in everyday conversation. (Well, perhaps not 'everyday', but definitely in contexts unconnected to Google search results and with the alternate definition of the term in mind.) I would expect that most people searching for "Santorum" before 2011 probably heard the word in that context and are wondering what it means.
99% of searches for "santorum" today might be searching for the man, but I seriously doubt that number was anywhere near as high e.g. six months ago. Should Google change their results around in response to sudden and transient current events like a politician suddenly gaining the spotlight?
I also think that your description of the smear campaign as an attempt to game Google is misleading. It is fundamentally an attempt to add a new word to the English language. It seems to be working pretty well. Getting it to rank high on Google isn't an attempt to game Google, it's an attempt to create a new word.
They're attempting to create a new word as part of a smear campaign. I don't see how attempting to use Rick Santorum's last name as the name for a sex act could be divorced from the idea that it's attempting to sully his name or how other people think of him when they hear his name.
edit: I misread this:
> I also think that your description of the smear
> campaign as an attempt to game Google is misleading.
thinking that you were claiming that it wasn't a smear campaign. My apologies.
Er, I never said it wasn't a smear campaign. I said it wasn't an attempt to game Google. It's not, it's an attempt to define a new word. That is definitely part of a smear campaign, but I don't think that part is all that relevant to determining the legitimacy of this search result. They have succeeded in defining a new word, and the site dedicated to doing so certainly should be near the top of the results for searches for that word.
I don't think that those who are not skilled with SEO should get a free pass from Google because they can't get their shit together.
The santorum definition is a media campaign, just like any other. I don't see why it should be penalized because it attempts to spread what some might consider the distatefullness of Santorum's political views.
Should a presidential candidate have to be skilled at SEO to get their site listed first for their name? Or should Google's algorithm be the skilled one?
The point is that Google is supposed to return the result people want for a given search result, not the result that has the best SEO. This big picture gets lost sometimes.
I would be interested to see if someone did the same thing with Obama.
My guess is that since Google is in bed with the Obama administration, we would never see anything like this.
The majority of people are supporting it because they hate rick Santorum and don't want him to become president.
It also makes me question the validity of the opposition. Rather than trying to win with logic and reason, many resort to mud-slinging, rumors, and false information. Tactics I despise.
I agree that such tactics are not helpful for a rational, adult conversation. However, if someone is spreading hate-speech about gays on religious grounds, he is far beyond the reach of logic and rationality.
I recommend reading the whole article — it explains why you are wrong, and how there is no "bedding" involved in this situation. The explanation is about halfway through the article (ctrl-f "google bomb").
Google isn't causing this. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if there were anything negative related to Obama like this, Google would remove it.
A similar campaign can be held for any word, personality, or cause. This is more like a political campaign than any form of manipulation. Google shouldn't be in the business of picking and choosing which popular movements should be "penalized" and which shouldn't.
Now if content farms, SEO or other forms of manipulation are involved then I agree 100% with you.
But I don't like the idea of a corporation suppressing a popular cause, which is really what this is.
Is there evidence of a real SEO type manipulation going on here? If so, your point would be a lot stronger if you provided some links (I am going on the principle that the accuser should provide the evidence which is why I haven't provided evidence of the nonexistence of manipulation).
I would sincerely like to know if there is evidence of widespread manipulation of search results here.
The intent of the campaign wasn't to Google bomb Santorum and it wasn't an attempt to "game Google's search rankings". The original intent of the campaign was to define the word "Santorum" and the fact is, it was successful.
Now that there are two definitions of Santorum, why should google favor one over the other?
If a man like Santorum was President, Google would probably be required by law to fix it. The problem with your excellent comment is that nobody gamed Google's search ranking. Google can't censor the result as it is legitimate.
The real problem here is Santorum's insane ideas and forcing his delusional beliefs on the public. Thus the Internet public has chosen to redefine his name as cultural slang. For Google to censor this would be simply wrong.
> But Google's overall politics happen to be the same as my politics, so Santorum gets unequal access to the 2012 Internet.
I doubt if Google are manipulating their search engine results based on a dislike of Santorum; do you have any evidence otherwise?
> Savage's prank actually discredits the Internet. Surely nobody's mind is going to be changed by that disgusting link. Instead, it just serves to associate Internet content with the culture wars.
The internet contains the totality of the uhman experience, so it is associated with the culture wars (and with everything else humans do).
> Google should penalize the shit out of it.
It should be up to Google how they run their website, provided they doing do anythning dishonest.
They tweak a myriad of other ranking anomalies, sometimes for PR, sometimes to combat spam. They choose not to tweak this one, every though the ranking comes from a deliberate and artificial boost in link quality.
I wouldn't want Google to attempt to squelch the culture wars, but I would hope that Google wouldn't allow themselves to become a part of the culture wars.
> Google obsessively tweaks all manner of other links in the index
Via algorithm or manual intervention? I thought they were dead set against manual tweaks. I imagine their todo list of algorithm improvements is never ending, so I'm not too quick to judge them on this.
It is a PR issue for Google, though. If someone is searching for Santorum, there's a pretty good chance they're a cultural conservative. When they see listings like this at the top of the search results, do they come away with a worse perception of Santorum or of Google? I wouldn't vote for Santorum, but I didn't really like seeing "frothy mix of lube and fecal matter". C'mon, Google, I just ate.
Well, come on. If you're googling a disgusting substance like santorum, don't be surprised if you get a gross result.
Which is to say: santorum is now a word in its own right. It's not a Google bomb in any sense: people can and do use it all the time to refer to the aforementioned substance. A month ago, that definition was definitely the more relevant, and five years from now, when the Santorum flash in the pan is over, that'll again become the most relevant item. What you're asking for is for Google to censor a word for the sake of a powerful man, who it happened to be named after.
Black is white. Pants are shirts. Minitrue called, "Santorum" is a substance and not a person.
The fact that this particular association is notorious almost entirely on the Internet, and that any notoriety it has achieved outside the Internet falls directly from its success on the Internet... well, that's not relevant. We have always used the word santorum as a common noun.
I think a lot of the distaste people have for santorum is that there was an active campaign to coin and propagate it. But lots of words have that heritage: if someone looks up "pegging" on Google, no one gets upset when it turns out to be an invented but widely adopted sex term.
Savage's hostile intent, though, has a major role in people thinking santorum's an illegitimate word, even though no one can point to any real metric by which Santorum should trump santorum; we all like to feign genteel shock at crassness. But we can't let our emotions, be they anti-Santorum or anti-Savage, dictate whether Google should manually intervene to change the ordering of the search. That road leads to 1984.
I agree with you on that clearly the it's a result that should not be shown. But there's still the problem of figuring out how to fix it in practice. Should Google point-fix this particular instance, fix it algorithmically even if the change is negative on the whole, or hold out for an algorithmic fix that is neutral or positive.
There are strong engineering reasons to not point-fix stuff. Maybe in this case there are stronger legal/political/PR reasons to get any fix at all out quickly. There certainly wouldn't have been any 2 weeks ago, when Santorum was still an also-ran.
You call the link disgusting as if it's some sort of universal value, but "disgust" is a culturally constructed physical reaction. Not everyone is disgusted by the same things you are. Some people think kimchi is disgusting. Other people think it's the most delicious thing on this planet.
I'm not trying to dissuade you from your disgust, but try to appreciate that not everyone shares your values.
Political satire in the past didn't inherently reduce access to opposing views. The first SERPs for a term on Google effectively are the Internet for a huge percentage of all readers.
I think the irony of deliberately re-engineering "language" in the name of "free speech" is lost on a lot of HN readers. It seems to me like almost the definition of Orwellianism. We're just not freaked out because we don't like homophobes.
We have always used the word santorum to refer to excreta. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Until very recently Rick Santorum was pretty much a nobody. His name was more likely to come up in a blog post about gay rights than on the front page of the NY Times.
Today, people are searching because he's literally front page news. This would seem to be an example of Google not keeping up with real-time events.
OTOH, in a few months or even weeks he'll probably be out of the race, so reversion to the mean seems likely.
Along with such notable somebodies as James McClure (who is currently being Google-bombed by a pickle company) and Norris Cotton (being victimized by a fluffy fiber).
The controversy over his remarks and savage neologism are what I remember about him and I was a bit of a political junkie at that time. Outside of Pennsylvania I doubt many remember much more about him.
Google's algorithm takes into account the timeliness of events. So despite his recent success, people are probably still looking up the word, rather than the person (and on a large enough scale to overcome the timeliness weighting).
If that were the case, the normalized search volume for the term would be fairly constant over time. But according to Google Trends it isn't http://www.google.com/trends?q=santorum . Further, you can see that the search traffic of other Republican presidential candidates has a similar pattern. So clearly right now, and for the past year, the vast majority of searches have been for the person rather than the supposed word.
(And nothing definite can be said about what the intent was in the time before that.)
Hard to tell if it's an intentional, exceptional tweak - it could be, but it could also be a general rule along the lines of 'if there's a lot of news and it's a person in Wikipedia, lead with Wikipedia and then show the news.'
In one way I feel bad for the little guy as it's a horrible smear campaign against his name however when I look at some of his extreme policies I'm suddenly less sympathetic. He implies a lot of nasty things about a lot of different groups of people. I can't see any good reason others shouldn't do the same against him.
First, please, don't get me wrong because I am absolutely against his anti-gay policies myself.
From what I've read, the site which has given Santorum a meaning have made the demand that he stops talking negatively about homosexuals. If he does, the site will go away. This makes me think, even though I somehow think he deserves it: Isn't this essentially against free speech? Forcing someone to censor their opinions through non-violent troublemaking?
I probably didn't manage to phrase that well-enough to please anyone, but at least I've voiced my concerns.
This isn't forcing Santorum to censor his opinions, nor is it even an attempt to do so. It's counter free speech. He's free to say what he pleases, and a lot of people are free to call him a frothy anal sex byproduct.
This is exactly how the freedom of speech is meant to work.
Search engines need to keep a close eye on concerted efforts to manipulate results based on childish, political horseshit. Google is either failing technologically (unlikely), or is intentionally maligning a credible political candidate (very likely).
I think his politics are repugnant, but less than 1% of Google search queries for his name are looking for Dan Savage's prank. Google knows this. Google obsessively tweaks all manner of other links in the index. But Google's overall politics happen to be the same as my politics, so Santorum gets unequal access to the 2012 Internet.
Savage's prank actually discredits the Internet. Surely nobody's mind is going to be changed by that disgusting link. Instead, it just serves to associate Internet content with the culture wars. I don't think I'll upset too many HN'ers when I assert that the people most likely to be offended by that link are the people we'd most like finding better ways of informing themselves than talk radio.
Finally, and most obviously, we all happen to share the same sense of humor and political stance as today's Internet gatekeeper. But we are by no means assured of compatibility with the next one.
That "Santorum" link is perhaps the most notorious attempt ever to game Google's search rankings. Google should penalize the shit out of it.