HACKER Q&A
📣 brailsafe

How does Google know police shooting target's name?


A close friend of mine was recently the target of a fatal police shooting (justified), but his name was never released to the press. However, when I search for his name, the news articles talking about his death are at the top. This seems like a real problem.

EDIT: and exact string match doesn't bring up the AMP pages that report on it. There are no strings in the article pages themselves that mention the name.


  👤 kevindeasis Accepted Answer ✓
I'm not sure exactly, but I suspect it goes something like this:

An algorithm they are using are finding a match in some category(ies) for you that other people have already searched or it might be an AI trained model. Like there are people you know or close to your network, that searched for the same thing and they clicked the specific link.

Now use a curl in a vpn in a different network and you get totally different results.


👤 Nextgrid
When you do an exact match search by putting the name in quotes, does it bring anything? It should bring up content that contains the name and even highlight it.

👤 jereees
What’s the real problem in this case?