Google spokesperson: Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause
A Google spokesperson has given us a statement on the claims surfacing today around Google allegedly manipulating their auto-complete search suggestions in favor of presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Google told us “Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause. Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how Autocomplete works. Our Autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person’s name. More generally, our autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity of search terms.”
This is in response to a video from SourceFed that claims Google has done an unethical move by altering the auto-suggestions to make Hillary Clinton look better.
It is similar to Danny Sullivan’s story named Google says it’s not deliberately filtering “Crooked Hillary” suggested search to favor Clinton.
The Google statement comes about an hour after Matt Cutts, former head of search spam at Google, who is currently still on leave with the company, posted a nine part set of tweets responding to these claims, calling them false.
Here are those tweets:
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. http://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” http://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
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