I work at Google on ranking algorithms for Search. I'm aware of everything that controls how web pages are ranked. If I ever encountered a system that was designed to alter the results for political reasons, I would resign.
(Lots of other search engines use each other as backends, so don't be too surprised when they return consistent results.)
The "Pelosi drunk" results are also markedly different from DDG. I just now tried this one because the results were being manually short-circuited the day after the video went viral, both by DDG and Google (but not Bing). It appears that DDG has reverted to delivering actual results for that query while Google's appear curated.
During the election some fuss was made over auto-completion for "Hillary" vs. "Trump" searches ... apparently embarrassing for Google because these were soon "fixed".
I could go on and on.
Do you at least admit that Google restricts searches for the Christchurch shooting video? Maybe your definition of "political reasons" is very narrow.
I don't actually have a problem with burying Alex Jones. The only reason I have enough interest to engage in this discussion is that Google continues to deny these things.
Google has a policy about "sensitive and disparaging terms associated with named individuals" in autocomplete https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7368877?hl=en which is often why you sometimes may not see the queries in autocomplete that you expect. It also has a policy about "violent or gory predictions" so it wouldn't surprise me if you aren't seeing autocomplete suggesting the Christchurch video, if that's what you mean.
Where is the transparency or independent third party oversight to back up this statement?
Or do we just have to take it on faith?
Since you work on search at Google, maybe you could explain how typing "hillary clinton cri" stopped suggesting the common search term "hillary clinton crimes" and instead suggested "hillary clinton criminal reform".
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Apparently "crimes" a disparaging term when associated with "hillary clinton", but not when associated with, say, "jared kushner"?
Since it isn't a matter of a single word (crimes) being flagged as disparaging, this blacklist can apparently be finely tuned to specific prediction results. (Maybe it's not a simple blacklist, but an ML model. Even scarier.)
and so forth. Are you sure you aren't seeing your own search history as the suggestion? Another possibility is that you're seeing "... crimes" instead of the whole query? That can happen when the system isn't able to suggest a full query and starts suggesting individual word completions.
Yes, I was seeing "... crimes" when typing for "jared kushner cri". But with other names it shows a complete prediction:
"julian assange cri" --> "julian assange crimes"
"jeffrey epstein cr" --> "jeffrey epstein crimes"
I don't know the basis of the decision to enact that policy around autocomplete, but I do know Google has been sued many times due to the queries in autocomplete associated with people's names. https://searchengineland.com/google-faces-autocomplete-lawsu... https://www.pcmag.com/news/326136/google-could-face-lawsuit-... http://www.dmlp.org/blog/2013/filing-lawsuits-united-states-...
I mean, maybe this sounds implausible to you, but I think you should be conscious of whether you're discarding it as a possibility and why.
I've also worked at Google. Things that are clearly the case:
1. There are blacklists of certain political query completions on web search, like "hillary clinton emails".
2. There is a controversial query blacklist on YouTube with political content. Go look at the file in google3 if you really think the screenshots are faked:
https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/26/blacklisted-leaked...
3. Google News is quite clearly blacklisting Breitbart from ranking: it's indexed but in many years of using Google News I've never once seen it be selected. The Guardian, on the other hand, routinely makes it into nearly every selected story.
The writing is clearly on the wall for you. Whether organic web index results are reranked politically or not, and for what it's worth I believe you for that specific subset of the system, other teams in the company that didn't inherit the same culture are doing politically motivated things with the full knowledge and acceptance of the executives. It's only a matter of time before web search falls to that new culture too.
And when it happens you probably won't even realise it. Some team you've never heard of will quietly adjust a machine learning model in subtle ways you'll never detect, to "debias" it in order to yield "better outcomes".
2. I can't speak to YouTube's policies, but there isn't any evidence there that this was designed to favor either side, rather than just to avoid the issue entirely.
3. The guidelines that Google uses to assess the quality of websites are public. You can read them here: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...
https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-i...
That is by Google's VP of Search, Ben Gomes. That's your boss, supposedly. So, Human evaluators flag content in general ("low quality"); and particularly, remove or down-rate content which Google determines to be "fake news", as Gomes puts it.
and some of the results:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html
Consortium News, Global Research, Counterpunch, Truthdig, Russia Today, Truepublica, World Socialist Website and others - censored. Not entirely, but to a great extent.