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from the people-with-javascript-still-enabled dept.

Snopes reports [snopes.com]

Claim: Search engine Google manipulated results in favor of Hillary Clinton.
UNPROVEN

On 9 June 2016, the YouTube news channel SourceFed published a video [youtube.com] 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 [techaeris.com] 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 [qz.com]

The Groundwork [thegroundwork.com], 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.

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