I’ve been following the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni situation. Lately it’s strayed into PR / crisis management. One of the commentary channels I listen to mentioned today that celebrities might put out tons of stories and puff pieces to “push down” less-flattering results in Google searches.

But that won’t work with Wikipedia Seismograph! WS finds specific dates when Wikipedia pages attracted a lot of public interest and uses that to make time-bounded news searches. If you find that a celebrity did something or was the subject of something that attracted a lot of public interest between May 1 and May 4, and your Google News search is date-limited to between May 1 and May 4, the puff pieces won’t matter.

Crisis management is reactive and therefore it seems to me that it lags a little bit. Date-based Google News searches that are built on indicators of public interest can get you to the heart of what happened without having to wade through reputation management puff/slop.

You can tell Blake Lively’s been in the news a lot, her chart’s all over the place.