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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 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.
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 thought that they started blocking suggesting negative terms as it was too easy to google bomb names?
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
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