Search Engine Manipulation and The Agbani Darego Situation
‘I saw that your Agbani sister on my way to work today’ That’s a cool way of saying I saw your tall sister. Agbani is an adjective to Nigerians. If anyone describes you as an Agbani, you blush a little or a lot. Agbani in Nigeria means tall, graceful, possessing potential for fame. And this is not the Kalabari meaning of the name.
That is just what the name connotes to Nigerians. This also shows how highly people in my country think of her, ‘Our Agbani’!
On Friday, October 2nd October, Nigerian twitter literally was on fire. Our Queen ranked as the ‘ugliest Miss World’. There were no other names on the list. However when you search for the most beautiful Miss World you get a long list of names that include Aishwarya Rai, Priyanka Chopra, etc.
Chief Agbani Darego, MFR is a Nigerian model and beauty queen who was crowned Miss World in 2001. She was the first indigenous African to win Miss World. Also in the same year In 2001, Darego has crowned Most Beautiful Girl
When Miss Agbani Darego won the 51st Miss World pageant held in Sun City, South Africa, she was 18-year-old Nigerian computer science student. They chose her from 93 contestants from all over the world. Her victory was the highlight of that year for a lot of Nigerians. No one expected her to win the highly coveted crown. In the years that followed, she has kept a low profile amid roaring popularity among Nigerians, some of the people expressing outrage on the internet were not even born when she won, some are not even sure what they love or admire in her, it was just the whole idea that our own was ranked that ‘Ugliest’, coupled with racial tensions globally and it was the perfect fodder for an internet storm.
Nigerians believe that the ranking is racist and false. And did not hesitate to express their angry thoughts,
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How does Google search rankings work?
A search of, ‘Who is the ugliest Miss World’ on Google, will have the pictural image of Agbani Darego displayed with the following answers, “Chief Agbani Darego, MFR (born Agbani Darego, 22 December 1982) is a Nigerian model and beauty queen who was crowned Miss World in 2001. She was the first indigenous African to win Miss World” The fact that the search takes us straight to her Wikipedia page is perhaps the thing that angered Nigerians. What I realize is a lot of us don’t know how google search rankings work. Hence the outrage directed at Google.
They design google ranking systems to sort through hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second, and present them in a way that helps you find what you’re looking for. When you search for something, google index system asks hundreds of questions like, how many times does the page contain a keyword, page ranking, how many outside links point to a webpage and how important those links are all these happens under a minute.
What does a search engine do?
We define a Search Engine as a web-based tool, which searches the results of a specifically targeted query, entered by the user on the web, and in return, it provides you with a list of search results most appropriate to the keyword. We can define it as a computer program, which helps in locating the most relevant information asked by the user on the Web. Some popular Search Engines include Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu and MSN Search.
A crawler which travels through every page, every website which is readable and needs to be searched by using hypertext links on each page so it is discoverable.
· An algorithm creating an index from the pages which are read.
· An algorithm which receives the search request matches it to the information in the index and returns with the results to you.
What went wrong? Is Google to blame for the Agbani Darego Issue?
Yes, google is at fault, but not like they were trying to run our queen down, and set out to destroy our African Queen by ranking her poorly on purpose.
This issue is simply a case of google search gone bad and how easy it was for people to carry out mischief. Google is that fault because the algorithm allows malicious content to spread because Links show Google that a site and a page are valuable, so if you have a copious amount of external links pointing to the wrong page for a specific keyword, it’s going to affect search results shown to you. According to one Quora user, ‘These days I often give up after looking through the first half-dozen pages. Problems include hijacking of everyday words for company and product names, IT-related uses overshadowing older uses of words, people trying to sell me stuff, people trying to force their ridiculous world view down everyone’s throat… and Google seems to get less and less effective at filtering out this crap.’
What went wrong with the Ugliest Miss World drama was an issue of search engine manipulation. It’s possible that someone has used black hat tactics to manipulate the results. But we need not worry or panic: Google caught on quickly and has removed the website.
