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There's No Evidence That Google Is Manipulating Searches To Help Hillary Clinton (vox.com) 142

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."
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There's No Evidence That Google Is Manipulating Searches To Help Hillary Clinton

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  • Not quite true (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ulfilas2000 ( 4576737 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @06:44PM (#52292451)
    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.
    • Re:Not quite true (Score:5, Informative)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) <[ten.knilhtrae] [ta] [nsxihselrahc]> on Friday June 10, 2016 @07:18PM (#52292645)

      Well, if I search for "Hillary Clinton FBI probe" it returns the expected responses, and if I search for "Richard Nixon FBI" it doesn't suggest probe, but if I add probe it returns news of Watergate. So there's no evidence indicating that you are correct. I'd guess they probably don't link off of really short words, but I haven't really checked.

    • Try "Hillary Clinton e"

      Or better yet, "What, like with"

    • Really? Clinton FBI search for me gives this: 1. Could Hillary Clinton really be indicted over her emails? 2. The FBI Leaks Begin: Emails At Center Of Hillary Criminal Probe 3. White House calls FBI probe into Hillary Clinton's emails a 'criminal 4. The FBI Just Gave Hillary The Worst News Of Her Campaign! 5. FBI Drops Hints They Are Ready to INDICT Hillary Clinton!

  • by johanneswilm ( 549816 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @06:47PM (#52292459) Homepage
    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).
    • by Kohath ( 38547 )

      What motive would they have for hiding information from Germans? Do you think people who search the web in German are a significant voting bloc in the US?

      You might want to try searching for New Year's Eve sexual assault by migrants [telegraph.co.uk] though. Try it in English.

  • If it's true, that means tech companies end up with slightly better than average say in political outcomes.

    I'm okay with that.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    I searched "Donald Trump ban" and bankruptcy was not one of the top results. Your turn...
  • Case closed (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @06:49PM (#52292483)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      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...
    • 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.)
  • 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."

  • No doubt both sides are spending big dollars on SEO to feed data into google's databases.

  • I have suggestions turned off, because it slows down the internet.
  • by chipschap ( 1444407 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @07:04PM (#52292569)

    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?

    • They're both CFR, so of course they're friendly (as much as any CFR member still has human feelings) but the odds of Schmidt successfully orchestrating a secret pro-Hillary conspiracy inside Google Search are close to nil.

      Stop believing the scare stories you want to believe!

    • by Kohath ( 38547 )

      Excellent! Our plan to cede the story with grammatic mistakes to prevent readers from having a coherent discussion has succeeded beyond our initial projections.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • so what... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The_Rook ( 136658 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @07:16PM (#52292635)

    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

    • Re:so what... (Score:5, Informative)

      by pixelpusher220 ( 529617 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @08:03PM (#52292843)
      If they're so concerned with biased 'reporting', I'm sure they went batshit crazy when the CEO of the largest supplier of voting machines promised to Deliver Ohio to a presidential candidate [boingboing.net]

      Oh wait, that was a Republican for Bush so that wasn't a problem...
    • Re:so what... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @09:10PM (#52293107)

      if republicans were so concerned about biased political reporting from media outlets, they could always restore the fairness doctrine

      Republicans don't mind media outlets and news sources having an editorial slant. They just like to point out that when people claim that, for example, the New York Times isn't backing the Democrats, they're wrong.

      No, they're not going to be looking to bring back what the liberals want: counter-constitutional government censorship of political expression. That's the left's game, they love that crap.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I'll take legally mandated fairness over a small handful of people telling the majority what to think via their media empires.

        History tells us that doesn't end well.

        • I'll take legally mandated fairness over a small handful of people telling the majority what to think via their media empires.

          You've got it backwards. The "fairness doctrine" is government control of political speech (a direct violation of the first amendment) that exactly IS a "small handful of people" deciding who can say what. It's an agency of the federal government run by one of the president's political appointees deciding what is or isn't "fair" about someone expressing their opinion. Or, you could have what we have now: countless media outlets, millions of blogs and feeds, and endless innovation giving more and more platf

    • by Kohath ( 38547 )

      Read the link you just posted. It's about broadcast TV and radio stations. Is Google a broadcast TV or radio station?

      Also, the Fairness Doctrine has been gone for almost 30 years now. Try coming up with a complaint that's less than a quarter century out of date.

  • 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.

  • by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @07:19PM (#52292661)
    I thought that they started blocking suggesting negative terms as it was too easy to google bomb names?
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's also a libel issue. Courts don't tend to buy the "it's an algorithm" argument because Google clearly controls and continually optimises it. They seem to consider people innocent until proven guilty.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @08:03PM (#52292845) Homepage

    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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • by NotQuiteReal ( 608241 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @10:14PM (#52293341) Journal
    About 1.5 hours ago I could reproduce the results of this video [youtu.be]

    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...
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @10:19PM (#52293357)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • For some strange reason, I was unable to find that she has been convicted of any crime. Damn Google!
  • by steveha ( 103154 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @11:00PM (#52293471) Homepage

    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 [google.com]

    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 [google.com]

    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 [google.com]

    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 [google.com]

    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 [theverge.com]

    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

    • by Cytotoxic ( 245301 ) on Saturday June 11, 2016 @06:53AM (#52294325)

      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.

  • No Evidence?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ichthus ( 72442 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @11:26PM (#52293543) Homepage
    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!
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by quantaman ( 517394 )

      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

  • 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 HID
    • There was actually a study published in PNAS about search engine manipulation being able to change election outcomes. [pnas.org] They tested subtle manipulations in the results order, but presumably changing suggestions would have similar effects.

      This doesn't address intent or the existence of any such plot, but it does suggest that the take that this is all ridiculous and can have no impact is not correct.

      • Search results and autocomplete suggestions are very different things. Extrapolating findings of a study on one of those to the other is very wrong. Autocomplete is merely an aid in writing the query. If we were talking about Google suppressing an unusual or hard to spell word from autocomplete in order to discourage searches on that term, I could buy the theory. But here we are talking about Google not suggesting the last 3 characters of a very common word after the user had already formulated most of the
    • 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!

      Laugh if you will, but you know many rightwingers are not indoctrinated by years of higher education, and might not be familiar with abstruse terminology such as "crimes". They may know enough to type in the first three letters in the hope that Google would understand what they wanted, but clearly Google is conspiring to shield these potential Republican voters from the truth.

  • The first suggestion in the box is "Nixon crime". I tried this Friday and just now (Sat, 4:30-ish AM CST).

  • Vox!? (Score:4, Informative)

    by blogagog ( 1223986 ) on Saturday June 11, 2016 @07:03AM (#52294345)
    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... [freebeacon.com]
    • 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... [freebeacon.com]

      What? Google and Bing have different algorithms? Omigod!
      So, other than alerting all True Conservatives to use Bing so as to have their partially typed search terms regarding evil Hillary autocomplete correctly and save themselves a few characters of typing per search, did you have anything else in mind? A constitutional amendment regarding separation of search and state?

  • It's pretty clear what is going on this is just more search engine manipulation http://m.pnas.org/content/112/... [pnas.org]
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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

    • 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.

      well, you've pointed out the essential flaw in the radical right, small government, free market theory. If it doesn't come out the way they like it, they don't have any solution.
      Take Hollywood, probably the least regulated, most free market industry, as an example; with rare exceptions, what it produces is forgettable, crude, childish, stupid, vapid, uninformative, titillating, pandering, sniggering, etc. etc. etc; not family friendly, upstanding, patriotic, illuminating, inspiring, or educational; and, wo

      • Yeah, the hypocrisy, selective blindness, whatever you want to call it, displayed by some of these people is unbelievable. You can’t argue on the one hand that big corporations have full free-speech 1st amendment rights that allow them to be as politically active as they want to be (or can afford to be) and then on the other hand get all upset when you discover one of those corporations exercising those exact rights in a way you disapprove of.

        For the record, I don’t necessarily believe that cor

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