Google is manipulating search results in favor of Hillary Clinton | Hacker News Reader

Google is manipulating search results in favor of Hillary Clinton

siliconangle.com

30 pointskauffj21 comments

Is there someone that google WILL autocomplete "criminal" for? I tried a lot of people, including those who have been convicted of crimes, and it seems to refuse to do so. (E.G Mike Tyson, John Gotti, as well as politicians like Nixon, George W Bush, and even hitler.)

Yeah, this is a garbage article, "criminal" and "indictment" don't autocomplete for anyone. Probably so Google doesn't get sued for accusing an innocent person of being a criminal with autocomplete.

But.. I type "Hilarry ind" (to see if I get "Hillary Indiana" like the example) and I get immediatly "Hillary indictment". It seems that search results are very hard to reproduce and compare, given that they are very tailored, is this the case?

Interesting. It did seem a bit heavy handed, which made me wonder if something else was going on (and I figured by posting here I'd find out :).

For what it's worth, I _can_ get indictment to autocomplete for others (e.g. try "vick indi").

Also, I'm guessing this whole story would have gone nowhere if Google had just said "we filter labels like criminal" rather than claiming they only filter "offensive or inappropriate content".

Hmm, vick indi works but michael vick indi doesn't. Maybe it's doing it based on a name detecting NLP component.

"Clinton cri" and "Clinton indic" work too. Looks like this is a really basic filter that doesn't allow criminalish words to be added to full names.

Pee Wee Gaskins

That should have been Google's only comment on the matter. I wonder if they didn't even think to try such a simple test.

Life imitates art. Hooli Scrub.

Many people responding to this "story" are exhibiting classic confirmation bias. They're putting in searches that would confirm their existing belief that Hillary is "crooked" or that the system is rigged instead of ruling out other possibilities.

If you can show this happens for Hillary and not for 10 other people, that would be much more convincing than showing 10 times that it happens for Hillary.

NY Times has a fun interactive puzzle that demonstrates this bias: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick...

yes, that was more or less the idea of my comment :P

Just tested this and the article is on point, at least about "Hillary Clinton cri" search autocompletes. I took some screenshots for proof:

http://imgur.com/R2uqYlL

If we can't trust Google, who can we trust?

Bing?

I don't want to live in that world.

"Trump U"

First result

Google: Trump University Lawsuits

Yahoo: Trump University

Bing: Trump University

Try any other name. Google will not autocomplete "____ cri" to criminal, regardless of the name. The closest I could get was "Adam Lanza criminal minds".

hmm.. I guess the waters are a bit more murky than I originally thought -- it looks like plain whitewashing on the face of it.

Still don't like the idea that Google is no longer showing me the most relevant results, but instead the most appropriate results. Clearly, "criminal" was the desired term. Why is Google trying to push me away from it? (in this case and I assume many others)

It's called "filter bubble", see http://dontbubble.us

They filter lots of stuff in their autocomplete, people have observed for years that "embarrassing" questions work for a while, then disappear. You used to be able to measure how many people "wondered" if a particular celebrity was gay, e.g. "$CELEBRITY g"...[autocompletes to gay, because a lot of people typed it] because of autocompletion, that's now vanished. It's not got to do with the bubble.

You see similar behaviour with trump and bernie. Also the stanford rapist dude and martin shkreli. This isn't a story until they have evidence that it is significantly different than many other famous people on google. People keep comparing google results to bing but they are different engines

So we are upset over autocomplete now? Why not type in the word criminal yourself you lazy bums. If it wouldn't show any results for that then maybe the rest of us would care but google not autocompleting your bias is actually quite refreshing.

isn't this just showing the effects of your filterbubble as defined by google?

When life imitates begins to reflect a Netflix series it is sometimes hard to tell real life from fiction.

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