Why you can’t trust trending topics.
When I worked at Technorati back in the day I was, among other things, in charge of integrating back-end bits and front end-bits. One of those bits was Top Searches which was our version of Trending Topics. This was back in September of 2005 and our then President was being as douchy as ever so I got an idea. The stuff I was getting back from the search service was basically a list of text so it was a pretty simple for me to inject what ever I wanted into that list with a little PHP-fu so I decided to play a prank and inject “Impeach Bush” into the list. I had it randomize between places 6 and 10 so it wasn’t completely obvious. The next hour it was a legitimate trending topic so I removed my hack and just sat back to see what heppened. It went from my placement to number 3 the next hour and the hour after that it was the most searched for term on Technorati and stayed so for the rest of the day.
It was a harmless prank and as far as I know the only time it ever happened while I was still working there. But what really surprised me was how easy it was to manipulate the behavior of the entire userbase by simply suggesting a search.
Replies
Likes
