The suspicion that Google is up to something nefarious centres on Alphabet Inc. executive chairman Eric Schmidt’s long association with Democratic politics and the Obama administration. When we searched “Hillary Clinton ema” the second autocomplete result was “Hillary Clinton email charges”.
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Meanwhile, rival search engine Bing, which has about 10 per cent of the US search market, autocompletes the word criminal.
In a response to SourceFed’s report, a Google representative said in a statement to the Washington Times, “Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause”. The suggested searches in Bing and Google are entirely different and Google’s results are far more favorable to Clinton.
Drysdale pointed out in a Medium post that when users search for topics unfavorable to Clinton’s Republican rival Donald Trump, the relevant search suggestions are nowhere to be found there either. However, a test of that claim on Friday showed “Hillary Clinton indictment for emails” was the first autocomplete suggestion.
Next Page: What about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Google results? Is it consistent? No. Certainly, “racist” is an offensive term and yet Trump still gets stuck with it. This may have something to do with Google’s algorithm looking for more context. “More generally, our autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity of search terms”, said the statement. “Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how Autocomplete works”, a Google spokeswoman said. Bing’s search engine directed SourceFed to crimes, criminal and criminal investigation. Our systems are periodically updated to improve search, and our users’ search activity varies, so the terms that appear in autocomplete may change over time, ” adding, “our systems automatically filter a small set of offensive or inappropriate content from autocomplete predictions.
Choose any famous American who has been accused of a serious crime and Google their name followed by the letters “cri”, and in no case does Google suggest the word “crimes”. Google knows this, and its algorithm actually filters out inaccurate information in autocomplete.
Discovery Communications, which owns SourceFed, did not respond to a request for comment.
This manipulation of results is, as SourceFed points out, deeply disturbing.
Search engine optimization marketing expert Clayburn Griffin speculated at length about why this policy exists, but in part he thinks it boils down to Google’s trouble’s with the European Union authorities: “Google has been experiencing lots of legal issues over its search query suggestions, particularly overseas”.
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We’re asking these questions because online viral video site SourceFed believes it’s stumbled onto the biggest search and political scandal of this election season.
