Search 'idiot', get Trump: how activists are gaming Google Images



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 poll 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.