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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.
That poilcy doesn't work in other languages. Try searching for "Hillary Clinton kri" in Germany and one of the suggestions is "Hillary Clinton Kriegsverbrecher" (war criminal). Same in Norwegian with general secretary of NATO: "Jens Stoltenberg kri" gives both "krigsforbryter" (war criminal) and "kriminell" (criminal).
I'm okay with that.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I searched "Donald Trump ban" and bankruptcy was not one of the top results. Your turn...
I searched Google for "secret plan to manipulate search results to help Hillary" and got zero hits on documents detailing their secret plans. Hence no evidence. Case closed. Glad I could definitively debunk this paranoid conspiracy so fast.
It would be foolish of them to antagonize such a huge percentage of their users. It's best to stay out of politics as much as possible when you're in business. Except for maybe putting one or two of them in your pocket.
Reading the headline, my first thought was a guy saying "I spent all day searching with Google and could not find any evidence that Google is manipulating searches."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No doubt both sides are spending big dollars on SEO to feed data into google's databases.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I have suggestions turned off, because it slows down the internet.
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.
Type in "richard nixon cri" and see what you get.
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.
Of course they manipulate what people think. What an understatement.
They have access to a vast amount of power which there is absolutely no regulation on.
Of course they abuse it. It's what they were made to do. It's their purpose.
I thought that they started blocking suggesting negative terms as it was too easy to google bomb names?
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.
Hmm... do a search for "hillary clinton cu" and see what happens.
Definitely bias there.
There's No Evidence That Google Is Manipulating Searches To Help Hillary Clinton
It's true. I searched for evidence on Google and couldn't find any.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Even more intriguingly it doesn't list "crimes" as a search term even for people who are only famous for their crimes. There's probably a script somewhere that blocks autocompletion on *crimes.
And yet if you search for things like "Trump" and "racist" like SourceFed did, you sure get results from Google. Ditto for stuff on Bernie. To me, the damning evidence is the "trending" searches on each candidate. Hillary searches are very much linked with things like Benghazi and her email scandal, yet those results just aren't showing like "racist Trump," even though searches for those terms are just as popular.
If Google has a policy about pushing down search results for ANYTHING, regardless of who or what it is, that's a bad thing. Search engines should be as neutral as humanly and algorithmically possible. Otherwise, even if this is a perfectly innocent "mistake" by Google, it gives the APPEARANCE of bias.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Perhaps the reason searches for " cri" doesn't expand to "crimes" from Google is the Google is trying to avoid violating Europe's (and others) "right to be forgotten" laws, or rather, trying to avoid lawsuits from it.
After "googling" around a bit, Startpage.com is now my default search engine. (n.b. it is not a default option in Chrome... you have to "add" it, and don't be fooled by "searchpage" which is really yahoo.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I am no Hillary Clinton fan, but for me, it suggested "current job", "cuba" and "cut out". What have you been searching for that made it suggest something else?
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.
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.
Bill and Hillary just do it better than most.
Now that Google is in the political game, there's no reason to believe that Google doesn't lie, too. "There's no evidence" is clearly a lie of the first order. Hey, they're pretty good at it! Just like Bill and Hillary, they've learned to deny, deny, deny.
If you say something often enough, a lot of people will believe it whether it's true or not.
She's old enough that it works either way.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The headline is "There's No Evidence" but there was evidence presented in the video. Decisive evidence? Persuasive evidence? You decide.
For me, the most persuasive part was where they used Google Trends to see how popular the autocompleted searches actually were. The autocomplete suggested "hillary clinton crime reform" yet Google Trends said that search didn't happen often enough to graph. It was super rare and yet it was the most popular completion to "hillary clinton cri"?
Okay, let's ask Google Trends what is popular. I am providing you with clickable links so you can see the graphs for yourself. "hillary clinton indicted" vs. "hillary clinton indiana"
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=hillary%20clinton%20indicted%2C%20hillary%20clinton%20indiana&cmpt=q
Hmm, "indiana" was roughly as searched for in May as "indicted" but searches for "indiana" have dropped to near zero while "indicted" shot way up. So Google Trends says "indicted" is much more searched for than "indiana".
Here, let's add in "hillary clinton india" as another item on the graph.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=hillary%20clinton%20indicted%2C%20hillary%20clinton%20indiana%2C%20hillary%20clinton%20india&cmpt=q
Nope, "hillary clinton india" clearly isn't a popular search.
Okay, for "hillary clinton cri" what is the more searched-for completion, "hillary clinton criminal" or "hillary clinton crime reform"?
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=hillary%20clinton%20criminal%2C%20hillary%20clinton%20crime%20reform&cmpt=q
When they tried it they couldn't even get a graph for "crime reform" but by asking for a comparison of the two I got a graph. And wow, slam-dunk win for "criminal", way more searches.
Okay, I decided to try one on my own. I went to Bing and typed "hillary clinton cor" and the top suggestion was "hillary clinton corruption" Google? The top suggestions were "hillary clinton corporate" and "hillary clinton correct the record"
Okay, Google Trends, which of those three is the most popular?
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=hillary%20clinton%20corruption%2C%20hillary%20clinton%20corporate%2C%20hillary%20clinton%20correct%20the%20record&cmpt=q
And it's "corruption" by a large margin.
Interestingly, there is a completely different autocomplete for Google News results.
"hillary clinton cri" -> "hillary clinton criminal prosecution", "hillary clinton criminal video"
"hillary clinton ind" -> "hillary clinton indictment for emails", "hillary clinton indiana", "hillary clinton indianapolis"
"hillary clinton cor" -> "hillary clinton correct the record", "hillary clinton cory booker", "hillary clinton corruption reddit"
Now, Google claims that what is going on is just a standard thing where they block certain terms like "criminal" from searches. This story from The Verge argues, persuasively, that Google is telling the truth. http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/10/11906912/google-denies-autocomplete-search-manipulation-hillary-clinton
The most interesting point: most of the people searching for dirt on Hillary Clinton don't bother to type her full name, and the autocomplete gives more negative results if you just search for "hillary". Let's try that.
"hillar
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
A list of historical google bombs?
Nothing political on my first page.
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!
The first suggestion in the box is "Nixon crime". I tried this Friday and just now (Sat, 4:30-ish AM CST).
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
I'm not sure which Google you're talking about, but the one I'm aware of regularly antagonizes huge percentages of its users, between contentious Google doodles, their various political stances, the omnipresence of Google on one side of political campaigns, etc. I agree with you that it "would be foolish"; what you seem to be missing is that they are doing it in spite of that fact.
I can't believe someone at Slashdot is using Vox as a legitimate source for anything involving Hillary. Vox is practically a spokesperson for the Democratic party. O course they won't be able to see the search manipulation that is right before their eyes.
Here are more examples of how Google skewed the search results involving Clinton. Don't trust sources. Trust factual information that you can test yourself. http://freebeacon.com/politics...
Dude, this ain't the first time the online oligarchs have fucked their users, and this ain't the first time Google has fucked their users either
Before Snowden's expose of what NSA has been doing Google was NSA's pet - and if you believe that Google isn't doing something funny regarding their search result I got couple of bridge to sell ya
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's pretty clear what is going on this is just more search engine manipulation http://m.pnas.org/content/112/...
It's bad for the election if they were helping her through, but in my opinion I really don't think that is the case.
PanadasDigital is a SEO bureau
I remember Digg and Obama campaign. It was brainwashing stronger than in Orwell's 1984. Now we see same with Hilary Clinton. Some things never changes.
Why are people idiots? Google autocomplete completes based on search terms people enter, not spelling from a dictionary.
Unless people are already searching for Hillary Clinton crimes, nothing would show up in autocomplete.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There's always some evidence, just by coincidence.
So a total lack of evidence shows that there's a cover u*.&@
no carrier.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I’m confused... Why shouldn’t Google be able to rank their search results any way they want to? Google is a private company, not a utility or common carrier, they can and should be able to manipulate their search results any way they want to, with whatever innate biases they feel are necessary to keep their users happy. Are the people that are complaining about supposed bias seriously saying that they think some government bureaucrat should police search engines and shut down the ones they don‘t like? Really?? Come on people, get a grip! Chill out and let the invisible hand of the market do its thing. If you don’t like Google’s search results, the solution is obvious: use another search engine!
There, problem solved.