

Ask HN: Gaming Google Search Trends - x0ner

The other day I was on Google and noticed some amusing Google trending suggestions and it got me to thinking, is it possible to game that system? I know it's Google and all, but if you create a big enough (consistent) flow of searches, is it possible to get what you want to show up?<p>One could easily write a couple browser extensions and nix scripts to constantly make the same query over tor, proxy servers and legitimate networks over and over again at random times. The whole thing could run forever and in time one would think the trend would get picked up by Google and get inserted.<p>I can only imagine Google protects against this by looking at the patterns of the searches and checking to see if their relevant (ex: major disaster, crazy event). I sure they also include trending suggestions based on location, so even if it worked, how would you see it?<p>Creating the extensions, tools and other scripts wouldn't take that long. The whole thing in the rawest sense should be as simple as a open url, make query, close url.<p>Thoughts? Participants?
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danielamitay
This other article on HN shows that in Q4 2007, there were large spikes in
seemingly normal search terms: [http://nikgregory.com/2010/11/bizarre-google-
trend-search-sp...](http://nikgregory.com/2010/11/bizarre-google-trend-search-
spike/)

I wouldn't read too much into Google's protection against search trends.
Google cares about its search algorithm, but probably not as much about the
trends. Clearly if you do your programming and distribution correctly, Google
shouldn't be able to figure out that it was calculated. If anything, they
should look at how organic the follow-through on those searches are: If the
user searches for something, do they actually click on it or was it just a
search?

But then again, checking if the user follows through technically shouldn't
factor in, after all, how many people click through to something after
searching for "Weather New York, NY"? (Although they probably check if at the
very least the HTML was displayed, using their JavaScript).

Getting legitimate, unconnected searches is enough effort. Unless you choose a
quite obscure search term, you should need quite a large volume in order to
game the system in some sort of profitable/notable way.

