Google: Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause

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:

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

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

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.