Searching ‘tiny hands’ on Twitter brings up Donald Trump’s account

Why the President's account appears as one of the top results is unclear, but several theories have been suggested

A number of other unusual search terms were found to bring up the President’s profile as the top result too, including 'asshole', 'dickhead', 'Putin' and 'racist'

Twitter users have noticed that the site recommends Donald Trump’s account when you search for “tiny hands”.

A number of other unusual search terms were found to bring up the President’s Twitter profile as the top result this week, including “asshole”, “dickhead”, “Putin” and “racist”.

Speculation about the size of his hands dogged the President throughout his campaign, with Trump using the 11th Republican debate last March to address the matter directly.

“He said if my hands were small, then something else is small,” Trump said, holding up his hands and referring to previous comments from Marco Rubio. “I guarantee there is no problem.”

Why Trump’s account appears when you search for “tiny hands” on Twitter is unclear, but several theories have been put forward.

One possible explanation is that Trump has been tagged in so many updates mentioning tiny hands that Twitter’s algorithm now associates the two with each other.

Gizmodo, meanwhile, suggests that this could be the result of ‘googlebomb’-type prank, the likes of which caused negative Google searches such as “failure” or “miserable failure” to bring up then-president George W. Bush’s biographical page back in 2005.

“In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases,” explained Google executive Marissa Mayer – who is now the CEO of Yahoo – in a blog post.

“We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.”

If the latter is the case, Twitter appears to have no issue with manually altering its results as, at the time of writing, searches for “asshole”, “dickhead”, “Putin” and “racist” no longer bring up Mr Trump's account.