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There's No Evidence That Google Is Manipulating Searches To Help Hillary Clinton (vox.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Vox: A recent report via SourceFed surfaced suggesting that Google is suppressing the phrase "Hillary Clinton crimes" from autocomplete results, thus helping her candidacy. In the video, it shows that if you type "Donald Trump rac," Google will suggest the word "racist" to complete the phrase. However, if you type "Hillary Clinton cri," Google will suggest "crime reform" and "crisis" but not "crimes," despite the fact that Google Trend results show that people search for "Hillary Clinton crimes" a lot more than "Hillary Clinton crime reform." The video suggests some sort of reliance between the Clinton campaign and Eric Schmidt. But Vox reports there's a simpler explanation: "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." Apparently, Google has a policy of not suggesting that customers do searches on people's crimes. I have no inside knowledge of why it runs its search engine this way. Maybe Google is just uncomfortable with having an algorithm suggesting that people search for other people's crimes. In any event, there's no evidence that this is specific to Hillary Clinton, and therefore no reason to think this is a conspiracy by Google to help Clinton win the election." Earlier this week, Julian Assange stated Google is "directly engaged" with the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. It goes hand-in-hand with SourceFed's report, as they both mention Eric Schmidt's role in helping the Clinton campaign. Assange said, "The chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, set up a company to run the digital component of Hillary Clinton's campaign."
That isn't quite true - doing a search for Clinton FBI similarly does not return the FBI probe links, but crime is not in the phrase. Google is biased, and may be ok for technical searches but no longer for news or loaded searches.
Instead of just using the autocomplete, I typed "Hillary Clinton Crimes" into Google, Bing and Duck duck go.
Both Bing and DDG show up similar results about HC's crimes.
Google shows all top results with "HC and Google not cooperating to hide crimes" and "HC did not commit any crimes.
I suspect that no matter how your sugar coat it, Google returns positive results about HC while everyone else does not. Odd.
That article is extremely narrowly framed. Essentially, they're saying, "Hey look, Google aren't manipulating public opinion about Hillary Clinton in this one, very specific way!" Looks like a straw-man argument to me.
The evidence is presented in their video. It's there. It's real, and clearly irrefutable -- anyone can test it. And, it's pretty damning. The fact that VOX is now trying to do damage control makes it obvious that they, too, are complicit. Fuck you VOX!
sig: sauer
Exactly!
Here are 10 more examples of blocked searches:
http://freebeacon.com/politics/here-are-10-more-examples-of-google-search-results-favorable-to-hillary/
Picking one and saying "no evidence" is crap. Slashdot is better than that.
Gee! I wish I knew more about Hillary Clinton's crimes. I know! I'll use that Google thing to find out! OK, here we go: H-I-L-L-A-R-Y C-L-I-N-T-O-N C-R-I. Oh boy! I'm so tired of typing! Still three more characters to go. I don't think I can make it! I wish Google had autocompleted my search for me. I don't see "hillary clinton crimes" in the list of suggestions, though. Oh! If only there was a way for me to do this search! But no, it's impossible! Wait a minute! Of course! IT'S OBVIOUS! GOOGLE WANTS TO HIDE CLINTON'S CRIMES FROM ME!