Twitter experiment reveals weakness Google
After it came to my attention that a lot of people use Twitter primarily to tweet about, let’s be honest, relatively unimportant and even boring daily activities, I started to ask myself what people found to be worthy of sharing with their followers. Do you tweet when you have breakfast? When you go to work? When you go to the bathroom? When you…breathe?
These thoughts gave me an idea. My own little art project. A statement against the vomit of all possible uninteresting accouncements on the public Twitter timeline.
My idea was to make a Twitter account with the soul purpose of letting its followers know the owner is still breathing. The most uninteresting and trivial information you could possibly broadcast. Call it a universal hint to those every-five-minutes Twitter users.
Of course I wasn’t planning on doing all that typing myself. I made a script that uses the Twitter API to breathe in and breathe out alternately every minute (about the maximum you’re allowed to post). With the added bonus that people could use the link that was sent with the tweet to broadcast the breathing from their own account.
After it came to my attention that a lot of people use Twitter primarily to tweet about, let’s be honest, relatively unimportant and even boring daily activities, I started to ask myself what people found to be worthy of sharing with their followers. Do you tweet when you have breakfast? When you go to work? When you go to the bathroom? When you…breathe?
These thoughts gave me an idea. My own little art project. A statement against the vomit of all possible uninteresting accouncements on the public Twitter timeline.
My idea was to make a Twitter account with the soul purpose of letting its followers know the owner is still breathing. The most uninteresting and trivial information you could possibly broadcast. Call it a universal hint to those every-five-minutes Twitter users.
Of course I wasn’t planning on doing all that typing myself. I made a script that uses the Twitter API to breathe in and breathe out alternately every minute (about the maximum you’re allowed to post). With the added bonus that people could use the link that was sent with the tweet to broadcast the breathing from their own account.
After it came to my attention that a lot of people use Twitter primarily to tweet about, let’s be honest, relatively unimportant and even boring daily activities, I started to ask myself what people found to be worthy of sharing with their followers. Do you tweet when you have breakfast? When you go to work? When you go to the bathroom? When you…breathe?
These thoughts gave me an idea. My own little art project. A statement against the vomit of all possible uninteresting accouncements on the public Twitter timeline.
My idea was to make a Twitter account with the soul purpose of letting its followers know the owner is still breathing. The most uninteresting and trivial information you could possibly broadcast. Call it a universal hint to those every-five-minutes Twitter users.
Of course I wasn’t planning on doing all that typing myself. I made a script that uses the Twitter API to breathe in and breathe out alternately every minute (about the maximum you’re allowed to post). With the added bonus that people could use the link that was sent with the tweet to broadcast the breathing from their own account.
After it came to my attention that a lot of people use Twitter primarily to tweet about, let’s be honest, relatively unimportant and even boring daily activities, I started to ask myself what people found to be worthy of sharing with their followers. Do you tweet when you have breakfast? When you go to work? When you go to the bathroom? When you…breathe?
These thoughts gave me an idea. My own little art project. A statement against the vomit of all possible uninteresting accouncements on the public Twitter timeline.
My idea was to make a Twitter account with the soul purpose of letting its followers know the owner is still breathing. The most uninteresting and trivial information you could possibly broadcast. Call it a universal hint to those every-five-minutes Twitter users.
Of course I wasn’t planning on doing all that typing myself. I made a script that uses the Twitter API to breathe in and breathe out alternately every minute (about the maximum you’re allowed to post). With the added bonus that people could use the link that was sent with the tweet to broadcast the breathing from their own account.
One of the things that immediately struck me was that the account (@ademhaler, which means “breather” in Dutch) was automatically followed by scripted follower tools. Apparently, if you tweet a lot you’re attractive prey for these automated follow bots.
What shocked and surprised me, however, was that the Google search results were already heavily influenced by my Twitter account after a week. When you searched for “breather” the page at our server (http://breather.conceptables.nl, on which I’d posted the link to the breather) would be ever higher in the results, while it’s quite a generic word. This was the case despite Google claiming to have such an advanced algorithm to generate its search results.
It seemed strange that by simply repeating the same tweet you can drastically manipulate search results. You’d expect this kind of relatively simple manipulations to be filtered out.
During the development of our online feedback service Mopinion we were curious if this trick would also work with popular buzzwords, such as “social media”. We created a number of Twitter accounts with some relevant keywords for our service.
We felt it was a bit tricky as most people naturally don’t like these kinds of ways to increase their presence on Google. But on the other hand you could hardly call it spam. If no one adds you and you don’t send people messages uninvited you could not possibly qualify it as such.
What surprised us is that specialized Twitter search engines were also simply duped by the fake tweeting. There are actually no filters present in these search engines that remove such repetitions. Thus it’s not so difficult to manipulate your presence on Twitter and Google enormously.
We did get messages from employees of these Twitter search websites who weren’t very happy with us. But as it’s fairly easy to filter it out, we didn’t really see the problem for them.
To be extra careful I wrote a script to remove friendships with all Twitter accounts that would follow our “breather” accounts so nobody would be directly bothered by our messages, even if they did use the also dubious practice of automatically following an active user.
Our new Twitter accounts also had a huge impact on the Google search results (and of course the Twitter search results). With fairly generic queries, such as “social media”, “client interaction” (in Dutch) and “feedback” the Mopinion website showed up very high in the results.
It pays to tweet the same message as much as possible. Google does not have any filters for this.
When more people find out about this (like now :-s) it will temporarily be a free alternative to Google Adwords. Since Google’s business model is based on this service, it seems to be a high priority of the internet giant to make a filter for this as soon as possible.
When everybody starts doing it, it will become less effective. But Google will be completely overwhelmed by unaccurate search results. The loudest Twitter users will be on top.
We have, of course, terminated our Mopinion “breathers”, the experiment succeeded. But in the end people want to find what’s relevant for them and not something somebody is tweeting the most (or pays for, for that matter. That’s why Google has so strictly separated the paid results.) With a “breather” you could manipulate the real results.
This is not good news for Google or their users. To us it seems a priority to build in filters for this as soon as possible.
But the company’s employees are so brilliant, surely they’ll find out for themselves. Right?
One of the things that immediately struck me was that the account (@ademhaler, which means “breather” in Dutch) was automatically followed by scripted follower tools. Apparently, if you tweet a lot you’re attractive prey for these automated follow bots.
What shocked and surprised me, however, was that the Google search results were already heavily influenced by my Twitter account after a week. When you searched for “breather” the page at our server (http://breather.conceptables.nl, on which I’d posted the link to the breather) would be ever higher in the results, while it’s quite a generic word. This was the case despite Google claiming to have such an advanced algorithm to generate its search results.
It seemed strange that by simply repeating the same tweet you can drastically manipulate search results. You’d expect this kind of relatively simple manipulations to be filtered out.
During the development of our online feedback service Mopinion we were curious if this trick would also work with popular buzzwords, such as “social media”. We created a number of Twitter accounts with some relevant keywords for our service.
We felt it was a bit tricky as most people naturally don’t like these kinds of ways to increase their presence on Google. But on the other hand you could hardly call it spam. If no one adds you and you don’t send people messages uninvited you could not possibly qualify it as such.
What surprised us is that specialized Twitter search engines were also simply duped by the fake tweeting. There are actually no filters present in these search engines that remove such repetitions. Thus it’s not so difficult to manipulate your presence on Twitter and Google enormously.
We did get messages from employees of these Twitter search websites who weren’t very happy with us. But as it’s fairly easy to filter it out, we didn’t really see the problem for them.
To be extra careful I wrote a script to remove friendships with all Twitter accounts that would follow our “breather” accounts so nobody would be directly bothered by our messages, even if they did use the also dubious practice of automatically following an active user.
Our new Twitter accounts also had a huge impact on the Google search results (and of course the Twitter search results). With fairly generic queries, such as “social media”, “client interaction” (in Dutch) and “feedback” the Mopinion website showed up very high in the results.
It pays to tweet the same message as much as possible. Google does not have any filters for this.
When more people find out about this (like now :-s) it will temporarily be a free alternative to Google Adwords. Since Google’s business model is based on this service, it seems to be a high priority of the internet giant to make a filter for this as soon as possible.
When everybody starts doing it, it will become less effective. But Google will be completely overwhelmed by unaccurate search results. The loudest Twitter users will be on top.
We have, of course, terminated our Mopinion “breathers”, the experiment succeeded. But in the end people want to find what’s relevant for them and not something somebody is tweeting the most (or pays for, for that matter. That’s why Google has so strictly separated the paid results.) With a “breather” you could manipulate the real results.
This is not good news for Google or their users. To us it seems a priority to build in filters for this as soon as possible.
But the company’s employees are so brilliant, surely they’ll find out for themselves. Right?
One of the things that immediately struck me was that the account (@ademhaler, which means “breather” in Dutch) was automatically followed by scripted follower tools. Apparently, if you tweet a lot you’re attractive prey for these automated follow bots.
What shocked and surprised me, however, was that the Google search results were already heavily influenced by my Twitter account after a week. When you searched for “breather” the page at our server (http://breather.conceptables.nl, on which I’d posted the link to the breather) would be ever higher in the results, while it’s quite a generic word. This was the case despite Google claiming to have such an advanced algorithm to generate its search results.
It seemed strange that by simply repeating the same tweet you can drastically manipulate search results. You’d expect this kind of relatively simple manipulations to be filtered out.
During the development of our online feedback service Mopinion we were curious if this trick would also work with popular buzzwords, such as “social media”. We created a number of Twitter accounts with some relevant keywords for our service.
We felt it was a bit tricky as most people naturally don’t like these kinds of ways to increase their presence on Google. But on the other hand you could hardly call it spam. If no one adds you and you don’t send people messages uninvited you could not possibly qualify it as such.
What surprised us is that specialized Twitter search engines were also simply duped by the fake tweeting. There are actually no filters present in these search engines that remove such repetitions. Thus it’s not so difficult to manipulate your presence on Twitter and Google enormously.
We did get messages from employees of these Twitter search websites who weren’t very happy with us. But as it’s fairly easy to filter it out, we didn’t really see the problem for them.
To be extra careful I wrote a script to remove friendships with all Twitter accounts that would follow our “breather” accounts so nobody would be directly bothered by our messages, even if they did use the also dubious practice of automatically following an active user.
Our new Twitter accounts also had a huge impact on the Google search results (and of course the Twitter search results). With fairly generic queries, such as “social media”, “client interaction” (in Dutch) and “feedback” the Mopinion website showed up very high in the results.
It pays to tweet the same message as much as possible. Google does not have any filters for this.
When more people find out about this (like now :-s) it will temporarily be a free alternative to Google Adwords. Since Google’s business model is based on this service, it seems to be a high priority of the internet giant to make a filter for this as soon as possible.
When everybody starts doing it, it will become less effective. But Google will be completely overwhelmed by unaccurate search results. The loudest Twitter users will be on top.
We have, of course, terminated our Mopinion “breathers”, the experiment succeeded. But in the end people want to find what’s relevant for them and not something somebody is tweeting the most (or pays for, for that matter. That’s why Google has so strictly separated the paid results.) With a “breather” you could manipulate the real results.
This is not good news for Google or their users. To us it seems a priority to build in filters for this as soon as possible.
But the company’s employees are so brilliant, surely they’ll find out for themselves. Right?
One of the things that immediately struck me was that the account (@ademhaler, which means “breather” in Dutch) was automatically followed by scripted follower tools. Apparently, if you tweet a lot you’re attractive prey for these automated follow bots.
What shocked and surprised me, however, was that the Google search results were already heavily influenced by my Twitter account after a week. When you searched for “breather” the page at our server (http://breather.conceptables.nl, on which I’d posted the link to the breather) would be ever higher in the results, while it’s quite a generic word. This was the case despite Google claiming to have such an advanced algorithm to generate its search results.
It seemed strange that by simply repeating the same tweet you can drastically manipulate search results. You’d expect this kind of relatively simple manipulations to be filtered out.
During the development of our online feedback service Mopinion we were curious if this trick would also work with popular buzzwords, such as “social media”. We created a number of Twitter accounts with some relevant keywords for our service.
We felt it was a bit tricky as most people naturally don’t like these kinds of ways to increase their presence on Google. But on the other hand you could hardly call it spam. If no one adds you and you don’t send people messages uninvited you could not possibly qualify it as such.
What surprised us is that specialized Twitter search engines were also simply duped by the fake tweeting. There are actually no filters present in these search engines that remove such repetitions. Thus it’s not so difficult to manipulate your presence on Twitter and Google enormously.
We did get messages from employees of these Twitter search websites who weren’t very happy with us. But as it’s fairly easy to filter it out, we didn’t really see the problem for them.
To be extra careful I wrote a script to remove friendships with all Twitter accounts that would follow our “breather” accounts so nobody would be directly bothered by our messages, even if they did use the also dubious practice of automatically following an active user.
Our new Twitter accounts also had a huge impact on the Google search results (and of course the Twitter search results). With fairly generic queries, such as “social media”, “client interaction” (in Dutch) and “feedback” the Mopinion website showed up very high in the results.
It pays to tweet the same message as much as possible. Google does not have any filters for this.
When more people find out about this (like now :-s) it will temporarily be a free alternative to Google Adwords. Since Google’s business model is based on this service, it seems to be a high priority of the internet giant to make a filter for this as soon as possible.
When everybody starts doing it, it will become less effective. But Google will be completely overwhelmed by unaccurate search results. The loudest Twitter users will be on top.
We have, of course, terminated our Mopinion “breathers”, the experiment succeeded. But in the end people want to find what’s relevant for them and not something somebody is tweeting the most (or pays for, for that matter. That’s why Google has so strictly separated the paid results.) With a “breather” you could manipulate the real results.
This is not good news for Google or their users. To us it seems a priority to build in filters for this as soon as possible.
But the company’s employees are so brilliant, surely they’ll find out for themselves. Right?
Hey Kees Wolters,
That was an excellent piece of information, i also think that there will be ways to filter out such methods in future by search engines. But it also has its advantages, if you have a good set of information you can highlight them with the tweets you post, so it could also be used as a genuine marketing tool too…
Jeffy