The search results thrown up by Google often provide a neat little insight into what angles of a story are dominating coverage and people’s attention. The angles that get the most prominent coverage and the most interaction and responses are the ones that rise to the top of the search results. So what do they tell us about the current state of play in the Eastleigh by-election?
Here’s what Google’s top ten search results for eastleigh by-election (with the verbatim option turned on*) contain at the time of writing:
- Maria Hutchings and John O’Farrell (Conservative and Labour candidates in Eastleigh) have made controversial comments
- Maria Hutchings has made controversial comments
- Mike Thornton (the Lib Dem candidate) is favourite to win whilst Maria Hutchings and John O’Farrell have made controversial comments
- Maria Hutchings has made controversial comments
- Wikipedia entry for previous by-election
- Wikipedia entry for current by-election
- Maria Hutchings has made controversial comments
- Maria Hutchings has made controversial comments
- Maria Hutchings has made controversial comments
- One of my round-up blog posts on the by-election**
That makes for 7/10 entries being primarily or partly about controversial comments from Maria Hutchings.
I think we can file that in the ‘not going so well for the Conservatives’ pile.
* Google customises its search results based on where it thinks you are, who it thinks you are and what it thinks your track-record of searches are. This can be useful to figure out if your search for “golf” means the sport or the car. It also means different people can see very different search results. The verbatim option strips out all the customisation and shows you what the ‘underlying’ search results are before any personalisation is added to them.
** All my Eastleigh by-election round-up posts are available here, whilst don’t forget also Stephen Tall’s posts regularly reporting on the Eastleigh by-election which are here.
* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.
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7 Comments
I didn’t think Verbatim mode does remove all of that, instead it just searches for what you put in.
Matt: You’re mistaken on that. E.g. see the explanation at http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html – “With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as:
– making automatic spelling corrections
– personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
– including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
– finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])
– searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
– making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]”
And something Google may not reveal on Twitter, which suggests Conservative Campaign Headquarters is coordinating a mini-smear through some of its carrier pigeons.
http://labourlist.org/2013/02/tory-mps-send-identical-tweets-in-scripted-attack-on-lib-dem-candidate/
Mark – I was really talking about the geographical changes it makes, which I don’t think it removes (but then again i didn’t think it removed the previous history either, so I might be wrong).
Use startpage.com; it uses Google, but it’s anonymised – you get search results without any bias due to search history. That amongst many other privacy benefits.
Anyway, you’ll be delighted to learn from startpage that Maria Hutchings controversies dominate its search results on the Eastleigh by-election.
Speaking of Maria Hutchings, why is her campaign website still breaching Wikipedia’s Terms of Use by blatantly copying and pasting from it without attribution?
For those who haven’t seen it, compare:
http://www.vote4maria.co.uk/index.php/eastleigh
with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastleigh#History
Even after this was pointed out on Twitter several days ago and was picked up by the Huffington Post and the Daily Mirror, her campaign obviously think they can get away with brazen plagiarism because it’s still right there on her campaign website.
From our point of view, this may well play in our favour, unless those hearing her ‘controversial comments’ actually agree with her.. just a thought.
Mind you, those odd-balls were never going to vote for us anyway.