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I hate politics because we always have people come in and claim how Google is taking sides one way or another. Be it Google News showing more positive stories about candidate X and more negative stories about candidate Y or Google search manipulating the search results in favor of one politician over an other. This is always a popular topic every four years, including local elections and elections outside of the states.
The hot topic is if Google is manipulating the search results, specifically the auto-completions, in favor of Hillary Clinton.
Danny Sullivan covered it last Friday in his story Google says it’s not deliberately filtering “Crooked Hillary” suggested search to favor Clinton where Danny digs into Google Trends, compares it to other phrases about other politicians and why doesn't "crooked Hillary" come up.
Then the other day we get this bold video from SourceFed on more Google manipulation of auto-complete for Hillary's favor. It is convincing, here it is:
I'd also recommend you read what Rhea wrote, she works on reputation management, which specifically does work with manipulating auto-completions. She wrote Hillary Clinton's Search Results Manipulated by SourceFed, Not Google.
Google is a complex beast - personally, I doubt Eric Schmidt had someone make these changes but hey, without Matt Cutts on the job, who knows. :)
Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.
Update from Matt Cutts on Twitter:
1/ @SourceFed claims "Google has been actively altering search recommendations in favor of Hillary Clinton's campaign." That's simply false.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 10, 2016
2/ Their two anecdotes: [hillary clinton in] didn't suggest [hillary clinton indictment] & [hillary clinton cri] didn't suggest crimes.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 10, 2016
3/ It turns out that lots of people searching for negative things about HRC search for [hillary X], not [hillary clinton X]
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 10, 2016
4/ Here's some live screenshot examples, including [hillary in] returning [hillary indictment] as first suggestion. pic.twitter.com/VEn3A4ef5y
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 10, 2016
5/ And here's some more examples of Autocomplete returning negative suggestions for HRC, including "criminal email" pic.twitter.com/5oczWWvmmU
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 10, 2016
6/ See https://t.co/5avsTVn4ab for a smart write-up about how/why Google Autocomplete appears to avoid "crimes" for all, not just HRC.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 10, 2016
7/ Also see https://t.co/fLdlJ19BmX for another good take.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 10, 2016
8/ P.S. @mattlieberman I asked Google's search PR. They couldn't find a record of you reaching out to Google before publishing your video?
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 10, 2016
9/ @mattlieberman this is a super-technical area. Why make a long video of these claims without doing deeper research? It's just not true.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 10, 2016
