Google has no good explanation for why “Crooked Hillary” isn’t a suggested search

Type “lying” into Google, and it will suggest “Lying Ted,” the moniker US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump placed on his once-rival Ted Cruz. But type “crooked” into Google, and it doesn’t bring up the “Crooked Hillary” label that Trump has attached to his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. What’s going on?

Google has no good answer. When asked by Search Engine Land, the company sent back a generic response that answered nothing:

Autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity of search terms. Our systems are periodically updated to improve Search, and our users’ search activity varies, so the terms that appear in Autocomplete may change over time.

Vice’s Motherboard site has a good article on the situation, which was initially raised on a Reddit thread where many suspect a Google conspiracy.

As I told Motherboard, it was certainly weird to me. My initial thought was that perhaps because “Lying Ted” had been out there longer, it had more time to attract enough searches that, in turn, caused it to become a suggested search.

Google autocomplete & the Trump insults

That’s how Google’s autocomplete suggestions work: it shows the most popular searches it’s seeing that are related to the words or characters you initially type in.

Here you can see it in action for a search on “lying,” which brings up “lying ted” as a suggestion:

But for a search on “crooked,” you don’t get a similar situation for “crooked hillary,” as you can see:

Even if you expand the search to “crooked h,” you don’t get “crooked hillary” as a suggestion but instead the strange “crooked hillary bernie” coming up:

As it turns out, “Lying Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” are pretty much even in terms of search popularity, according to Google Trends, for this year within the United States. And while Lying Ted became popular earlier, at this point, Crooked Hillary has been out there long enough that you’d think it would be a suggested term also:

Well, maybe among all the terms related to “lying,” it’s “Lying Ted” that second most-popular after “lying down,” while for “crooked,” the top listed term of “crooked smile” and other terms beat the popularity of “crooked hillary.”

Nope. Back to Google Trends:

For over a month, “Crooked Hillary” has been more popular than “crooked smile” in the US, yet that’s not registering as a top suggested search. Crooked Hillary is even more popular than “Crooked Hillary Bernie,” yet only the latter shows if you do a “crooked h…” search.

As I told Motherboard, it’s weird. There’s no good explanation for it. Personally, I doubt Google would actually proactively filter the search. But it’s neither confirmed nor denied that, so the guessing, speculation and assumptions will continue.

Google does use various methods that it doesn’t discuss much to filter out some terms. What terms and for what reasons, it doesn’t specify. I asked again about this, twice, and got no answer.

When I last wrote about autocomplete in detail about five years ago, Google had told me these types of reasons might cause a suggestion to be censored either through an automated or human review process:

• Hate or violence related suggestions
• Personally identifiable information in suggestions
• Porn & adult-content related suggestions
• Legally mandated removals
• Piracy-related suggestions

Since then, Google still hasn’t posted any of these reasons to its site. Its help page on autocomplete simply says that some terms might get filtered for “policy reasons” without any further detail:

If no predictions appear for a particular word or topic, it could be that:

• The search term isn’t popular.
• The search term is too new. You might need to wait a few days or weeks to see predictions.
• The search term was mistaken for a policy violation.

While it’s easy to get concerned with Google over this — and there are good reasons for it to deserve some criticism, especially when it effectively responded in silence, the bigger issue is whether Google is perhaps slanting search results themselves to favor Clinton. That certainly doesn’t seem the case.

Someone who starts to type in “crooked” in hopes of finding information about “crooked hillary” is almost certainly going to continue that search whether or not Google automatically fills in the rest. It’s such an unusual term that they’re most likely deliberately seeking that out. And the results they get back aren’t positive to Clinton:

As with the flap over Facebook Trending Topics, concerns over suggestions are real but far more important is the focus on what people get in the stuff that actually see the most. Is Facebook News Feed content or Google search results being skewed for some political agenda?

 

This doesn’t appear to be happening with Google (nor did it seem the case with Facebook). Still, a weird situation with the suggestions isn’t going to help Google’s credibility.

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