According to some reports on the Internet, it appears that Google results are getting tilted in favour of U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. However, the search engine giant is denying any such foul play.
For example, searching for the keyword “Hillary Clinton cri” results in suggestions for “Hillary Clinton crime reform” and “Hillary Clinton crisis” and “Hillary Clinton ind” brings up suggestions on Hillary Clinton and Indiana, independents and India on Google, whereas the same keywords on Bing and Yahoo search engines yield phrases that link Hillary Clinton to crime and the possibility of her getting indicted.
When contacted, a Google spokeswoman denied any such manipulation. She also gave a statement in favour of the search engine’s auto-complete.
“Autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity of search terms. Our systems are periodically updated to improve search, and our users’ search activity varies, so the terms that appear in autocomplete may change over time,” she said in an email. “Additionally, our systems automatically filter a small set of offensive or inappropriate content from autocomplete predictions.”
According to SourceFed, the search results that Google’s autocomplete suggests is coming higher up in the trending topics. For example, according to Google Trends, “Hillary Clinton indictment” has been a much more popular search term throughout the first few months of 2016 than any other search results.
According to SourceFed, negative search results were showing up for Bill Clinton’s party and his primary competitor Donald Trump, however, there were no results that showed up when we searched for Bill Clinton’s negative nickname that Trump has been using for quite some time now.
SourceFed also pointed out that former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt is reportedly behind a data-analytics startup, which definitely is one of the major vendors of technology for Bill Clinton.
