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Snopes reports
Claim: Search engine Google manipulated results in favor of Hillary Clinton.
UNPROVENOn 9 June 2016, the YouTube news channel SourceFed published a video in which they accused search engine giant Google of manipulating results in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
[...] While the claims posited in the video [...] may sound like the workings of a conspiracy theorist, SourceFed didn't fudge any of its evidence. We double checked the videos findings and confirmed that Google does return different results than Bing and Yahoo for searches such as "Hillary Clinton Cri" and "Hillary Clinton Ind". For instance, Google completes the search "Hillary Clinton Cri" as "Hillary Clinton Crime Reform", while Bing and Yahoo complete the search as "Hillary Clinton Criminal Charges" and "Hillary Clinton Criminal". Google provides this result despite the fact that "Hillary Clinton Crime Reform" is a less popular term on Google Trends.
However, that does not mean that Google is manipulating search results in favor of the Democratic presidential candidate. Google's autocomplete function uses a variety of factors, including the popularity of a search term, to determine results. Furthermore, Google has also said in statements that its autocomplete does not provide offensive or disparaging results when partnered with a person's name.
[...] While it's true that Google Autocomplete will not show "Hillary Clinton Criminal" when searching for "Hillary Clinton Cri", we couldn't get Google Autocomplete to label anyone a criminal. When we searched for the names of various criminals along with the prefix "cri", we received results for "cricket", "criminology", "crisis communication", and in the case of recently convicted swimmer Brock Turner, no results.
It should be noted that Google honcho Eric Schmidt is all-in for Hillary.
Last Autumn, Quartz reported The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that's working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House
The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt--the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet--to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Sunday June 12 2016, @02:52PM
If I am searching for criminals, then criminals should pop up.
...but if you are searching for a famous person's opinion on credit cards, crisis management, criticism, crispy bacon etc. then Google shouldn't second-guess you and suggest you search for their criminal record.
This isn't about manipulation of google search results - just the auto-complete suggestions you get when you're typing in your search. You can still search for for "Hillary criminal allegations" but google won't pop it up as a suggestion as soon as you type "Hillary cri".
If you didn't RTFA, The Snopes article went on to show that the whole accusation is based on confirmation bias by trying the same thing with Sanders, Trump, Bernie Madoff and Charles Manson and getting the same result: Google tries to avoid auto-complete suggestions that may be disparaging - it doesn't stop you making those searches.
Frankly, I think we could live without all forms of autocorrupt -its occasional helpfulness doesn't make up for its frequent malapropisms.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2016, @05:57PM
You can have my tab-completion bash shell when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
(Score: 2) by tfried on Sunday June 12 2016, @09:13PM
You can have my tab-completion bash shell when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Arguably, though, this isn't auto-completion, but completion-on-demand, which does make quite a difference in a context like this.