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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."
From TFS:
"The video suggests some sort of reliance between the Clinton campaign and Eric Schmidt."
Um, could that be alliance? Or do Schmidt and Clinton rely upon one another?
Does anybody out there edit this stuff any longer?
The article gives TEN, count 'em, TEN examples of Google's tampering, not just the one silly example cited in this silly Vox blog post. And I'm sure there are many, many, many more.
if republicans were so concerned about biased political reporting from media outlets, they could always restore the fairness doctrine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
I searched duckduckgo for "secret plan to manipulate search results to help Hillary" - and all the results start with "Did Google..."
The results for the same search on Google start with "There's No Evidence..." or "Google denies", but to be fair there is also a link to the whack jobs at zerohedge...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
About 1.5 hours ago I could reproduce the results of this video
And now, mysteriously (even non-google) searches for "hillary clinton ind" are mostly coming up with "indiana" instead of "indictment"... weird.
of course, maybe in the last hour, zillions of sock puppets are searching and clicking thru on indiana...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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!
"Clearly irrefutable" except for the fact that all of the examples are clearly refuted -- anyone can test it.
I just typed in "brock turner rap" and got zero autocompletes. You don't think rapist would be at the top of the list?
I typed in "donald trump law" and got nothing about law suits.
"Bernie madoff frau" and "Bernie madoff cri" return neither fraud nor crime.
"Paul Bernardo murd" and nothing about murder.
It's pretty obvious that google is very careful not to autocomplete potentially slanderous terms for anyone.
I stole this Sig
There seems to be more going on than google's first blush take. (this ends up being long as I try search terms, but stick with me, it might go somewhere)
There are several terms from the 90's about the Clintons that should be of relevance to people wanting to research that period.
Rose Law Billing records. Vince Foster. Or how about a generic politician term: Corruption.
Searches for "Hillary Clinton billing records" autosuggest on bing after you get to "bill", but on Google the autocomplete not only doesn't suggest that, it goes blank after you type "billi"
Same for Vince Foster. "Vin" gets the suggestion on bing. But you get to "Vinc" on Google and suggest goes blank.
Corruption: Just type the "C" on bing and "Corruption", "Crimes" and "Cattle Futures" come up. On google you have to go all the way to "Corr" to get the suggestion of "corruption reddit". Something that doesn't appear on Bing at all.
For Trump - on Bing type in "Donald Trump R" and get the number one suggestion, "racist". On Google you have to go to "Rac" to get a list of Donald Trump racist suggestions.
Trump on Bing - Bankruptcy comes up after "B", on google it comes up after "Bancr"
Trump and Lie - Bing suggests after li, Google gives two related suggestions after "Lie" Since those are generic politician terms, let's check Hillary. Bing suggests after the "L". Google gives a suggestion to a youtube video "lies for 13 minutes" after the word "lie".
Some of this could be some algorithm to fight googlebombing. But it sure seems targeted to whitewash Hillary Clinton's background - Vince Foster and the Rose Law Billing Records were pretty big news stories back in the 90's. The Vince Foster stuff is probably full of really nutty conspiracy theorists, but the Billing Records was not really in the realm of the tinfoil hat crowd. And it would be odd for this to be algorithmically removed at this late date - there would be a decade of relevant web articles before the art of googlebombing became a thing.
To bolster this supposition, I tried Bush and w, looking for war crimes. After "W" Bing suggested "Worst President Ever". Hey, that was the original google-bomb! So I tried it on Google. Totally suppressed. You go to "worst pr" and google suggest goes dark.
So that would suggest that this phenomenon is the result of the anti-googlebomb tech, whatever that is. With Eric Schmidt having set up "The Groundwork" to handle tech issues - perhaps this is a service they offer. Using knowledge of Google's procedures and tech, they could be providing SEO services to wipe out things that campaigns don't want seen.