Iv’e been reading some of the chatter about how some folks have gamed google trends recently. Tech Crunch had a blurb about some inverted text that made it to the top of trends that speaks to how it’s done. Let’s not forget the swastika incident that actually made the Drudge Report a few weeks ago, that was an eye-opener.
What we’re finding is that Google can be socially engineered. I imagine it’s only a matter of time before distributed “bot search” agents render Google Trends worthless. In the mean time, there a host of ways to game the system.
For example, todays hot trends include the following:
Heidi Wood Clothing
movies and advertising,
wayman tisdale,
shtetl,
logical homes,
ziami .
A quick bit of research shows that the “shtetl” reference was made in an interview at the Democratic Convention. A convention-goer compared the state of the party to a “Shtetl”, or a historic jewish village of Eastern Europe. The flurry of searches on this term is legitimate and understandable.
Wayman Tisdale is a former NBA player who recently lost part of his leg to an amputation.
The other terms are more intersting. The Heidi Wood Clothing reference has been co-opted already by the search term gamers. Yes, a new fashion line was launched by Heidi from “the Hills”, but oh my how the term has been usurped.
Ziami is the distributor for Heidi’s clothes as far as I can tell. Now, tell me, if you’re launching a new clothing line wouldn’t it be just great to engineer your keywords to the top of Google Trends?
Who’s gaming what here?