Trump news is bad news

Why oh why would anyone not like little Donny?

Apparently, chief Oompa-Loompa of the USA, Donald Trump, has no limit to his paranoia.

This week, he’s declared that Google are “left-wing” when it comes to search results for “Trump News”. By this, he means that they are being rigged so that the vast majority are negative.

Wow. Google have understandably denied this (not the negative bit, but that any political viewpoint is used in the complex algorithm that decides what to bung in front of you when you type something in that little box in your browser).

Analysts have pointed out that extra weight is probably given to pages that a lot of other people linked to. There’s no point in asking Google that, though. If they explained that appearing higher in search results could be achieved by putting ice cubes down your pants, there would be a simultaneous water, electricity and freezer shortage as everyone in charge of a website attempted to cram extra frozen water into their underwear.

The search giant admits there are more than 200 factors involved in the lightning-fast decision making process, so it’s obviously upsetting for Donny to discover that 96% (according to him) of the news articles were from left-wing news outlets and, therefore, not exactly singing his orange praises.

I’d have tried some other search engines myself, but Google are now so dominant (more than three-quarters of all searches worldwide go through them) I can’t remember what the others are any more.

Is The Donald right, though? I mean he is Right, in a political sense, but is he correct? As far as I can tell, here in the UK he isn’t exactly number one in the population’s hearts.

So I’ve conducted a bit of in-depth research myself, taking an unprecedented almost four minutes of my time to run some other searches and see if the results were broadly negative or positive:

Crocodile news: They bite stuff and have killed some people. On balance, I’d say that’s probably negative.

Spider news: Well, let’s put it like this – if I do ever sleep again, it’ll be with the lights on. Not just negative, but unremittingly terrifying too.

Kitten news: Nawww! One had to be rescued from a toilet! OK, one story about a six-legged cat, but it was still cute.

There you go then. Generally, if something is frightening, scaly or dangerous, the results are negative. If it’s friendly and cute, they’re positive.

Jury’s still out on having more than four legs, though.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 31st of August 2018. Yes, column title back to normal after a quick email exchange with the editor.

The column seems to be appearing on their website again, too... or maybe it's just because the last two have been vaguely real-world related. Check it out, if only to see the horrifying over-tweaked photo of me. Not sure how they did it, but I presume that moving all the sliders in image-editing software to one end on the scale might well achieve a similar result.

(CD A-Z: A new one for me - although I think I had it on cassette once - Altered Images' "Happy Birthday" album.)