Good news this morning for gay-hating Republican candidate Rick Santorum – who may be seeing his “Google problem” start to dissipate. Since becoming a frontrunner in the nomination race, the former senator has faced embarrassment, with LGBT activists manipulating search engine results to propel an alternate (sexual) definition of his name to number-one on Google.
But now the Spreading Santorum (NSFW) webpage seems to have been banned from the first page of results. Google have blamed this on changes to their SafeSearch algorithm – but that doesn’t explain why a link to the (arguably cruder) definition on Urban Dictionary still sits atop the listings in its full glory.
Santorum is dribbling down Google’s rankings.
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“We make more than 500 changes to our algorithms in a typical year,” a spokesman for Google told Yahoo News. “With each of those changes, sites will shuffle to different positions in our search results. We have not manually taken action to change the ranking of the site.” As Search Engine Land notes, the shift may be related to Google’s announcement Tuesday that it has refined its algorithm to highlight “official pages.” “We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications,” Amit Singhal, Google search SVP, wrote in a blog post. “The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.”