Is Google Manipulating Searches? (Video)

[mborgelt]

Here is a video where a company pointed out where Google could be manipulating search. Politics aside, do you think they did their due diligence? I think that there are a few other things that could be at play that weren't analyzed in the video

Google searches for Hillary Clinton yield favorable autocomplete results, report shows

Google?s autocomplete function seems to be tilted in favor of Hillary Clinton, a report says, but the company denied that it skews results for any candidate.

I haven't had a chance to take a deeper look into this with any tools but I am curious to see what everyone thinks!

 

[JoyHawkins]

Re: Is Google MAnipulating Searches? (Video)

This is the best write-up I've seen on it: Google says it?s not deliberately filtering ?Crooked Hillary? suggested search to favor Clinton

 

[James Watt]

One thing to add to Joy's post that the search engine land article didn't mention... I guess a few days ago Wikileaks released something about the chairman of Google also running a tech startup working with Hillary to help with the election. Not sure entirely what I think about wikileaks (violence against women isn't excusable, whether you like Jello, swim fast, or are trying to topple corrupt regimes) but if Wikileak's report is true, then I wouldn't take Google's statement that they haven't done anything funny too seriously.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I wouldn't be one bit surprised if there was some under the covers engineering going on. If that's the case though, I doubt an autocomplete change is the extent of it. It's not like it's just Google though, just came out a bit ago that Facebook was engineering their 'trending on facebook' feed to lean left politically. Given my own political orientation and the republican front runner I'm not exactly grabbing my pitchfork over it, but it definitely raises some huge ethical questions.

My two cents... even if Google's not clean on this one, they're still better than traditional media has been for the last century. Hooray for improvement?

To add to that... the biggest problem I see with internet as a source of political information, is that most of it's incredibly optimized towards only showing us what we're going to click on and react to. In my facebook feed at least, I have a pretty wide range of friends, but I see a pretty small subset of what's posted, and it's a subset that's tailored to my interests. For better or worse, we're all living in self selected echo chambers, which I'm sure is part of the growing political extremism that's been growing the last decade. We don't have 3 news channels to pick from, we have a million sources and we end up with the ones most finely tuned to our own beliefs and sensibilities, and it's easy to forget there's a whole world out there then. All that happens without special interest involvement even... just a relic of the algorithms.

 

[Tim Colling]

I suspect everyone and everything and I trust very little when it comes to:

• The internet
• Google
• Politics

Then again, for Google or any other non-governmental organization, my (Libertarian, i suppose) motto is, "It's their house, so they get to make their own rules for it".

 

[Tim Colling]

Oh, and one other of my core beliefs: If a politician is speaking, he or she is probably not being entirely truthful.

 

[cbpayne]

Matt Cutts has weighed in:
https://www.seroundtable.com/matt-c...ted-hillary-clinton-search-results-22227.html

 

[Tim Colling]

Oh, and one other of my core beliefs: If a Google employee is speaking, he or she is probably not being entirely truthful unless there is no impact whatsoever upon adwords revenues.

 

[cbpayne]

Oh, and one other of my core beliefs: If a Google employee is speaking, he or she is probably not being entirely truthful unless there is no impact whatsoever upon adwords revenues.

I not sure what that has to do with this. If you repeat the examples that Matt Cutts demonstrates, you can see for yourself about the false claims about the manipulation. What has that got to do with adwords?