Google: Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause

Google's communications team and Matt Cutts come out to call the allegations that Google altered their search suggestions in favor of Hillary Clinton false.

Chat with SearchBot

google-politics-elections-usa3-ss-1920

Google has denied claims surfacing today that the company manipulated its autocomplete search suggestions in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Google’s communications team issued this statement today:

“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.”

The company later posted about the issue on its blog.

This is in response to a video from SourceFed that claims Google has altered the autocomplete suggestions to make Hillary Clinton look better.

The Google statement comes about an hour after Matt Cutts, the former head of search spam at Google, who is currently still on leave from the company, posted a series of nine tweets calling the video’s claims false.

Here are those tweets:

Last week, Google denied favoring any candidate after other accusations of favoring Hillary Clinton. See our story about that: Google says it’s not deliberately filtering “Crooked Hillary” suggested search to favor Clinton.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.