Overview Of Some Techniques Of Internet Search Manipulation

The most common form of obtaining quick information on any topic today is searching the Internet. Although it cannot always be considered accurate and true, information gathered in that way is often used to make important decisions. Posts on social media and various portals are considered more unreliable than information which users search for themselves through Internet search engines. Search engines work by collecting terms from web pages and links to those pages. They use specially designed programs (crawlers, robots) which browse and analyse keywords on web pages. In that way, the pages are indexed and categorized by different algorithms and, as such, displayed as search results to users. However, it is less known that even such search results are subject to various manipulation techniques, such as Astroturfing and Google bombing. The Aim of those manipulation techniques is to influence the attitudes of persons who search them by frequently displaying the content of individual web pages. For the purposes of this paper, research was conducted by searching complex terms in Internet search engines which are related to politics immediately before the local elections held in Croatia in May 2021.