Industry news
Google is more favorable to Hillary Clinton
Earlier this week, an investigative video created by news and
pop culture website SourceFed went viral, drawing millions of views on Facebook
and YouTube.
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The seven-minute-long video accused the search giant Google of
manipulating autocomplete suggestions to be more favorable to Democratic
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, with some examples of how Google
differed from its competitors Bing and Yahoo.
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It claimed, for instance, that typing in "Hillary Clinton
cri" would result in terms like "Hillary Clinton crime reform"
rather than "crimes," or that "Hillary Clinton ind" would
yield "Hillary Clinton Indiana" rather than "indictment."
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In comparison, the video noted that autocomplete results for
"Donald Trump rac" would include the word "racist" and
"Bernie Sanders soc" would yield "socialist."
"The intention is clear. Google is burying potential
searches for terms that could have hurt Hillary Clinton in the primary
elections over the past several months by manipulating recommendations on their
site," SourceFed's Matt Lieberman said in the video, published Thursday.
Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has repeatedly
accused the media of biased coverage of "Crooked Hillary," even
weighed in on the SourceFed video.
"If this is true, it is a disgrace that Google would do
that," Trump said in a statement sent to Business Insider. "Very,
very dishonest."
"They should let it float and allow people [to] see how
crooked she really is," he added.
But Google is denying that its search results are tipping the
scales toward Clinton -- or any other political figure, for that matter.
In a statement to the Washington Times, a Google spokesperson
said "Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause."
And in a Friday blog post, Tamar Yehoshua, Google's vice
president of product management in charge of the site's search feature, further
explained that the autocomplete feature will not offer up derogatory terms in
relation to any person.
"The autocomplete algorithm is designed to avoid completing
a search for a person's name with terms that are offensive or
disparaging," Yehoshua wrote. "We made this change a while ago
following feedback that Autocomplete too often predicted offensive, hurtful or
inappropriate queries about people. This filter operates according to the same
rules no matter who the person is."
Yehoshua emphasized that autocomplete terminology "isn't an
exact science" and the results of the algorithm "changes
frequently."
"Predictions are produced based on a number of factors
including the popularity and freshness of search terms," he added.
"Given that search activity varies, the terms that appears in Autocomplete
for you may change over time."
Further, the Google executive noted that while autocomplete
predictions are a popular search feature, it does not actively limit the search
results.
"It's a shortcut for those who are interested,"
Yehoshua said. "You can still perform whatever search you want to."
Source Fed later came out with a follow-up video published
Friday to explain the thought process behind their original accusations and
defended its results.
"We saw something that raised a lot of red flags for us so
we spent time doing research -- the results of which were worth sharing,"
Lieberman, the Source Fed host, said.