Bettina Wulff And Her Google Problem

The slight “quirkiness” of Google’s famed search engine used to only affect Rick Santorum with “shameful” search results, but now, is the former German First Lady getting street-cred that she doesn’t need?

By: Ringo Bones

A few days ago the news that the former German First Lady Bettina Wulff is suing Google for defamation because the famed search engine’s autocomplete function “hints” that she had a somewhat “racy” past – as in suggesting that she used to be a high-class escort. As the wife of the wife of the former German President Christian Wulff, such quirky Google search results suggesting that she has a “racy” past is just the kind of street-cred a woman of her stature doesn’t need. But is the Google “overlords” at Mountain View or Palo Alto at fault?

A few years ago, a prominent gay rights activist in America launched a campaign to make a GOP homophobic politician by the name of Rick Santorum have his surname to become the latest word in the American English lexicon signifying the “nastier” aspects of male gay sexual intercourse. Maybe it was the work of internet-savvy “hacktivists” not employed by Google who tweaked Google’s famed search engine via esoteric search engine optimization tricks that if you Google search Santorum – the search result, more often than not, is something that should be reserved for ages 18 and above. But is such web-based trickery also at work when it comes to Bettina Wulff’s latest “Google Search Problem”? 

During his tenure as the German president, Christian Wulff – as I know from news coming out of Germany – never got to any fight with internet-savvy German or Eurozone based anarchists and their ilk. And based on the still developing story on Bettina Wulff’s Google problem, it could be that this “smear campaign” could be the work of one lone internet-savvy cyberstalker who knew a thing or two about high-level Google search engine optimization tricks.