Did Google Manipulate Search for Hillary? [video] (opens in new tab)

These claims are pretty flimsy. For one thing, Yahoo's search engine is Bing, so it's fallacious to say that two of three search engines yielded the same result, and that result is thus more valid or accurate than that of the dissenting engine. Further, if Google did scrub results, they didn't do a very complete job, as they're more than happy to suggest "hillary clinton email" and plenty of other negative terms. I also suspect that Google's search suggestions algorithm is a bit more involved than "tally the frequency of entire search queries and return the most common ones."

In a wider sense, it's a bit of a leap to think that Eric Schmidt has direct control over Google searches. There would have to be a chain of contacts leading from him to someone in the engineering department, or at least a few developers who built the "scrub sensitive terms from the suggestion list" feature. Surely they're not _all_ working for Clinton. Or surely this power would have been abused other times in the past. It's just so much more plausible that this is a complete coincidence than that there's some kind of Google-based conspiracy to install Hillary Clinton as a dictator by forcing people to type the entire phrase "hillary clinton indictment" into a search engine before they can have their crazy beliefs validated.

Additional reading:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-cl...

It is interesting that this got removed from HN's homepage. But I'm sure there is a good reason as the moderators seem to do a great job.

Edit: maybe I don't understand the ranking algorithm. I saw this at the bottom of the best first page. 15 minutes later and I can't find it in the first few pages. But only 24 votes so maybe it doesn't qualify for the secondary pages?

Its hard to believe Google would do that. There is so much risk of being exposed. As an alternate hypothetical - A Google engineer who has knowledge of their internal systems could suggest a means of external manipulation, that would accomplish the same goal, without the risk.

If you type just "hillary clinton", Benghazi is in the autocomplete, so this seems like cherry picking to serve a narrative to me.

This is really concerning, and disappointing if true.

I'd be less concerned if they were also cleaning up autocomplete for the other candidates, but it appears they are not.

"Brock Turner Cri" also autofills "cricket" and not anything criminal related. This is likely due to the hoopla around people googling for criminal records and google penalized a bunch of companies for it a while ago.

I did this autocomplete exercise with several candidates about 6 months ago, and Hillary-related search autocomplete terms were (by far) the most damning and amusing.

If this is true (and based on my exercise, it is), I'll be deactivating my accounts and adding 127.0.0.1 google.com www.google.com accounts.google.com to my /etc/hosts file.

Their examples of supposed manipulation mostly work the same if you replace "hillary clinton" with "jeffrey dahmer". In particular, "jeffrey dahmer ind" suggests "jeffrey dahmer indiana" and "jeffrey dahmer indonesia".

If your headline can be answered with "no" then you probably shouldn't post it.

Who knows, maybe they got cleared because someone was trolling the suggestion engine, just because there is heavy logical correlation that suggest higher rated search terms should be suggested, that doesn't mean there are not other factors that outweigh it. We don't really know how it works.

I am not being defensive of them, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if it was true, just that they got caught. It is actually pretty fascinating and scary how entangled the Google universe and the Government are, and right or wrong, they are seem to be more invested in their vision of the future more than financial* gains.

* but money is always a little bit a part of it

When I was following the primaries, I preferred Bing's tool to Google's here(just search "primaries" from a US location in either tool). The Google one seemed overly simplistic, especially earlier when there were more potential delegates.

I still tend to search with Google, but Bing at least seems to give a more 'unfiltered' view of your query. Google seems to have a lot more heuristics tweaking things in the background, so I use them for my first search and switch to Bing if I need to see everything for some oddly specific query.

I also don't see electoral fraud and exit poll discrepancies talked about as much anymore:

https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-elect...

An interesting read from April which continues to be relevant and attributable to last Tuesday's primaries as well.

I'm glad this guy knows so much about how search engines work. He should start one, it sounds easy! He just has to map each query to the single, unchanging answer that's the same for everybody!

This is was I get in Berlin, Germany in Incognito mode:

http://imgur.com/ps3Ahaa

This could also be neighborhood or search history or social network related, no?