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Comment by bodono | Hacker News Reader

Try "hillary clinton emai". From a fresh chrome session in NYC I get nothing, not a single autocomplete result. On the other hand "donald trump emai" gets:

* donald trump email * donald trump email address * donald trump email list * donald trump email newsletter * donald trump email list signup

And just to drive the point home I tried "root_axis emai" and got "root_axis email". Try anyone else and you get similar results, 'barack obama emai', 'george bush emai', etc etc. So yes, this is proof that the results are scrubbed for Clinton email.

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I got curious and tried the names of a bunch of public figures. Some of "<first and last name> e" yielded "email" as the suggestion. But these did not: elizabeth holmes, tom jones, tom cruise, brad pitt, gwyneth paltrow, roger federer, will smith, jimmy carter.

Since Hillary Clinton is not unique, then it's not proof that her results are treated differently.

Why would you expect “brad Pitt email” to be something that auto completes? You would, on the other hand expect “Hillary Clinton email” to auto complete because there was a huge controversy about it.

I’m not saying google is manipulating auto complete intentionally (though they might be), I’m just saying your counter examples are irrelevant.

It would be like “Donald trump Russia” NOT auto completing then someone saying “but neither does Taylor swift Russia, so we’re good.”

The poster claimed Hillary Clinton was unique, meaning the only person that applied to. For me, she was not. Since she's not unique, then her being unique can't be used as evidence.

Claiming that she's unusual, since you expect it to work for her based on stories written about her is a different claim.

You're misrepresenting my claim.

1. I said "only for Clinton" in the contect of Trump vs Clinton. Then I compared to other U.S. politicians, where the example still holds. The intended meaning is perfectly clear.

2. Obviously the fact that Clinton was the topic of a scandal involving email is the assumed context here. That's why I said "if anything, we would not expect "email" to be autocompleted for trump" (implied: but for Clinton, email is a more relevant search term based on published news, etc.).

They all work fine for me, e.g., 'tom jones emai' -> 'tom jones email', only Clinton didn't.

None of those other people were involved in major stories with email in the headline. If you look at the actual results, you'll see that it doesn't make any sense to not get suggestions for "Hillary Clinton email".

Compare these results:

* https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hillary%20clinton%20em...

* https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=will%20smith%20email

Seems to go both ways though as I'm not getting any auto completion results for "donald trump stormy daniels" either. I'm guessing they scrub things that are highly sensationalized in the news.

"stormy daniels" doesn't get any autocomplete results for me even without trump, my guess is this is more about adult search terms getting blacklisted rather than political. For example "donald trump e j" gets "donald trump e jean carroll", E Jean Carroll recently accused Trump of a serious sexual assault and this is autocompleting.

When I type "Donald Trump R" (or Ru or Russ etc) no autocomplete results contain the word Russia despite plenty of news coverage. When I type "Donald Trump Epstein" no autocomplete results. Must be a conspiracy by google to protect the president... or drawing conclusions based on individually cherry-picked autocomplete results is like drawing conclusions from numerology.

The same thing happens with Russia for "barack obama rus" "hillary clinton rus", "george bush rus", etc. - none autocomplete for me despite the fact that there was lots of news items relating those politicians and russia during their careers. However Clinton is the only one that doesn't appear to autocomplete for email, suggesting that it is specific to her. When I type "donald trump epstei" I get "theo epstein donald trump" (for some reason the word order is flipped), which would suggest to me that epstein is not blocked in the way you suggest, and it's just that not enough people are searching that term, or that the autocomplete algorithm hasn't caught up to the latest news on epstein and trump yet. However "donald trump e j" does autocomplete to "donald trump e jean carroll", which is relating to a serious scandal for the president. This isn't cherry picked I'm afraid, it really does look like intentional blocking of "hillary clinton email" from autocomplete.

None of those people had a gigantic Russia scandal though, Trump did, so you must still account for this unexplained aberration. If anything, the Trump/Russia scandal had more coverage than the Hillary e-mail scandal, so it's an even more difficult aberration to explain.

Also, if I type "hillary e" I get "Hillary Emails PDF" as an autocomplete suggestion. If I type "clinton e" I get several email suggestions "clinton email PDF" ,"clinton email film", "clinton email FOIA", "clinton email download".

Please include these confounding results in your analysis

I can believe Google is attempting to de-emphasize scandals on both sides. As an aside, I do get "russia investigation" as autosuggestion for trump.

I think the bigger problem is that these adjustment appear to be done manually. We know that's what they're doing to avoid racist autocomplete phrases (and reasonably so, I think most people would agree). Having such judgments made on specific political topics/events/scandals will inevitably result in political bias, especially in an organization whose workforce is so politically skewed to one side.

My only point is that autocomplete results for arbitrary one-off queries isn't instructive, especially because many people see different autocomplete suggestions. As I've already pointed out, its possible to find strange results for anything if you look hard enough.

If you type "Donald Trump Ru" into an incognito search you will not get the Russian Investigation. To GP's point, it's numerology to keep focusing on this and drawing conclusions of political bias.

Actually both Obama and Clinton had major stories relating to Russia including the failed 'reset', the annexation of Crimea during the Obama administration, obama's "red line" of using chemical weapons in syria which was circumvented by russia, and Obama telling Mitt Romney that Russia was not a threat in the 2012 presidential debates. So yes, they have huge stories relating to russia. And your autocomplete results just bolster the evidence that 'hillary clinton email' has been made a special case and is not organic!

Those stories barely saw a fraction of media coverage compared to Trump/Russia. The Obama/redline thing was primarily reported as a story about Syria, not Russia. If you type "obama red line" you get plenty of Syria suggestions which makes sense.

This is the problem with search query anecdotes, it ultimately produces a subjective and pointless debate about how one should interpret search suggestions for arbitrarily selected one-off queries. There is no methodology here, and we don't even know how widespread any particular suggestion results are. Any person with an agenda will be able to cherry-pick search queries that confirm their narrative.

For me "donald trump ru" autosuggests "russia investigation" (4th place). Compared with absence of "email" even for "hillary clinton emai".

Try news.google.com. It works there.

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