US presidential hopeful Rick Santorum and the curse of notoriety

Former US Senator Rick Santorum has a unique problem in American politics – his name is TOO well known and it is producing far more sniggers than it is supporters.

Santorum is expected to soon announce that he intends to run for the Republican Party nomination for President. At this point in the electoral cycle most wannabe candidates are desperate to get some name recognition. They will do almost anything to get voters to notice that they are alive. But Rick Santorum has just the opposite problem. His name is becoming far too well known – and not in a good way.

Just Google “Rick Santorum” and you will see exactly what I mean. This works equally well if you type his name into Yahoo or Bing. Almost any search engine will produce the alternate definition of “Santorum” that equates his name to a gay sex act.

Santorum’s problems started in 2003 when he provoked the fury of gay rights activists by comparing homosexual intercourse to paedophilia and bestiality. Blogger Dan Savage decided to fight back by inviting online supporters to come up with new definition for the word “Santorum”. And if you have Googled it by now you will understand why Savage said at the time he was pleased to “attach his name to a sex act that would make his big white teeth fall out of his big, empty head.”

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By using a specially designed network of website links, activists succeeded in keeping the new definition of Santorum at the top of search returns. Now increased media attention means that every time someone mentions Santorum’s “Google problem”, a whole new avalanche of searches keep the results at the top of the list. And every time Santorum himself tries to address the issue he just generates more hits.

Other politicians and misbehaving celebrities know that it is possible to pay consultants to manipulate negative search results and drive them further down the rankings. Buying up paid search results could also help more positive stories about Santorum appear further up the screen. But as this story is gathering more and more attention and therefore more and more hits and links it will be increasingly hard for anyone to make Santorum’s name synonymous with “2012 presidential candidate”.