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Looking for the new governor? Google seems to have inadvertently already signed on as a supporter of the man who will presumably try to succeed him, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
Put “Eliot Spitzer” into a Google search With or without quotation marks around his name, the first two items to come up lead right to pictures of Cuomo. Coming in first is the attorney general’s homepage. Second is Cuomo’s official biography on the office’s site.
Neither item mentions Spitzer, whose big shoes Cuomo spent last year convincing New Yorkers he was going to fill.
Google search results can be manipulated—“Google bombing,” for instance, is a deliberate effort to take advantage of the company’s search algorithm by creating a large number of sites which use “anchor text,” or text visible in a hyperlink.
The algorithm, it seems, is still picking up on anchor text created while Spitzer was still attorney general—in other words, all the days over the last eight years before Day One. Or it could have darker significance: Cuomo, after all, tried to carry on the family tradition by running for governor in 2002, and the assumption is that he will make another attempt as soon as Spitzer clears the way. Spitzer, meanwhile, is out to remake state government, perhaps laying the groundwork for a national bid along the way.
This may not be the only time one elbows the other out of the way.