According to recent research, politicians and celebrities seem to be increasingly turning to reputation management companies that can help them push out unwanted search results reflecting on them in a negative way. One of such companies, Veribo, has reported a 70% surge in politicians, businesses, and celebrities who are secretly using its services in order to push out unwanted “damaging” data from the Internet.

These days, over 90% of Internet users go straight to search engines when they need to find information. This is why for businesses or people who depend on reputation, it is awkward to see the unwanted details near the top of search results, whether they are true or not. According to the reputation management company, its work protects global household names, including international businesses and public figures and executives. Indeed, for such people and entities protecting their online reputations may be worth millions of pounds.

In the meantime, Veribo’s Chief Executive Officer Roei Deutsch has just become Israeli Minister of Finance Yair Lapid’s top media adviser, and has cultivated a Facebook following for the minister. As you can see, online search results can be easily altered – for example, the reputation management companies upload and promote relevant content and portals while pushing down unwanted search results. They do this by trying to create material and sites which will overcome existing results and blend in naturally in the person’s search results page. As such, positive or neutral search results are pushed up with special promotional tools, optimized along with the existing content. However, it seems that they mainly work on search engines to alter the visibility of search, rather than affecting real content, so you can still learn the truth if you are an attentive reader.

Perhaps, such companies should learn some tricks from the Russian President Mr. Putin, who banned all information about his daughters both online and offline so successfully that the people still have no idea what they are doing, where they live, and even whether they are married or not – nothing. This is an impressive result – no leaks, total censorship – I wish they did the same with children porn but for some reason it only works for two particular kids and nobody else.