Donald Trump is #winning. On the back of an already excellent week where he was gifted a football and impeded a monarch, right now the president is also leaping up Google’s image search rankings, to pole position.

When you type the word “idiot” into Google’s image search, Trump is the first returned result. This is partly because the Green Day song American Idiot was used by protesters to soundtrack his trip to London. But since then there’s also been a concerted campaign to capitalize on that association, and manipulate Google’s algorithm, by linking the word to the picture. Mostly this involved people upvoting a post containing a photo of him and the word “idiot” on Reddit.

This may seem unfair to his most fervent supporters. But if there’s one thing Google is keen to emphasize, it’s that search ain’t fair.

The company has always refused to play God when it comes to their algorithm. Even when the search term “Jew” started returning a hook-nosed caricature in 2004, rather than delete the image, they instead took out ads next to it to explain why antisemitic imagery, as well as antisemitic websites like “Jew Watch”, were appearing so high up the results.

“A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query,” they explained. “Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted.”



They continued with that line of argument when, in 2009, searches for “Michelle Obama” began returning a picture of the first lady’s face retouched to have ape-like features. Again, the company decided to raise awareness alongside it rather than tinker.

The famous algorithm is constantly being reworked, but only to make it more useful, not more culturally sensitive. After all, opening the door to one manual review might open the door to them all.

The fact that the system can still be gamed is surprising, and judging the scale of its effect is controversial, not least because media articles about the “controversy” feed into it.

Searching “rapist” before the US election was likely to bring up at least five images of Bill Clinton in the top 10. Threads that tagged the 42nd president were making it to the front page of Reddit, already in the top 20 most visited websites according to traffic ranking site Alexa. From a platform that large, it was a short hop to the top of the rankings.

Many of these were rudimentary, almost meaningless. “RAPIST! RAPIST! RAPIST! RAPIST!” “Today this rapist turns 70. Happy Birthday, rapist.” Most originated from the notorious Reddit forum TheDonald, where fans of Trump congregated to spread his gospel of doing whatever you like, screw the consequences.

The forum moderators would pin a post to the top of the forum to encourage others to upvote it, and the swell of upvotes would push it to the front page of Reddit, which already styles itself “The front page of the Internet”, causing it to leap up to the top row of Google images.



For example, for the term “fake news”, TheDonald’s team managed to get CNN’s logo up the charts. Likewise, for a long time Redditors battled US telecoms giant Comcast, trying to get a swastika to the top of the company’s image searches by posting the company’s name over and over beneath the hooked cross. They later tried the same with photo sharing site Imgur.

It was a perfect wheeze for a while, but while Google’s algorithm is opaque, it is clear the effect also seems to fade rapidly. The Clinton images no longer appear.

In 2013, the English Disco Lovers movement was started as a deliberate Google bomb to hijack the search results of the English Defence League, the far-right movement founded by Tommy Robinson. It worked. But as people continued to prefer anti-Islam rhetoric to Sister Sledge, it faded down the rankings, until it became what it is now – seventh on the second page.

In less trafficked queries, though, the link can persist. “Sick person opens jar of pickles” still points to several pictures of Hillary Clinton doing exactly that on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

The irony, as you may be aware, is that despite there being no provable link between the concepts, an article in the Guardian featuring a picture of Donald Trump and the word “idiot” will only reinforce the results further. Let’s hope no one clicks on this or links to it, and say only, very soberly: “Trump Trump Trump Trump idiot idiot idiot idiot.”



• This article was amended on 20 July 2018 because an earlier version referred to “poll position”.