
Did Google Manipulate Search for Hillary? [video] - makufiru
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFxFRqNmXKg&feature=share
======
orochi235
These claims are pretty flimsy. For one thing, Yahoo's search engine is Bing,
so it's fallacious to say that two of three search engines yielded the same
result, and that result is thus more valid or accurate than that of the
dissenting engine. Further, if Google did scrub results, they didn't do a very
complete job, as they're more than happy to suggest "hillary clinton email"
and plenty of other negative terms. I also suspect that Google's search
suggestions algorithm is a bit more involved than "tally the frequency of
entire search queries and return the most common ones."

In a wider sense, it's a bit of a leap to think that Eric Schmidt has direct
control over Google searches. There would have to be a chain of contacts
leading from him to someone in the engineering department, or at least a few
developers who built the "scrub sensitive terms from the suggestion list"
feature. Surely they're not _all_ working for Clinton. Or surely this power
would have been abused other times in the past. It's just so much more
plausible that this is a complete coincidence than that there's some kind of
Google-based conspiracy to install Hillary Clinton as a dictator by forcing
people to type the entire phrase "hillary clinton indictment" into a search
engine before they can have their crazy beliefs validated.

------
makufiru
Additional reading:

[http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-
cl...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-claims-
google-involved-hilary-clinton-campaign-1564220)

~~~
hidamon
also [http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-
working...](http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-
hillary-clinton-campaign/)

------
MichaelGG
It is interesting that this got removed from HN's homepage. But I'm sure there
is a good reason as the moderators seem to do a great job.

Edit: maybe I don't understand the ranking algorithm. I saw this at the bottom
of the best first page. 15 minutes later and I can't find it in the first few
pages. But only 24 votes so maybe it doesn't qualify for the secondary pages?

~~~
dang
It fell in rank because it was flagged by users.

There's a penalty on youtube.com stories by default, but we turned it off in
this case because the allegation seemed _prima facie_ interesting enough to
let the community have a crack at it. Of course, it's highly politically
charged and we normally don't want that stuff on the front page. But there was
an intellectual-curiosity element to it as well.

That said, the community _has_ had a crack at it, in votes, comments and
flags, and the flags won. I don't see a reason to override that.

(By the way, it's on our list to display [flagged] on cases like the current
story when the flags are this powerful. Hopefully that would have answered
your question.)

~~~
Houshalter
Sad that a small minority of users can manipulate HN's front page to suit
their political biases. This post is certainly more interesting and important
than everything else on the front page.

Flags should be used for stuff that actually violates rules. Not a "disagree
button".

~~~
dang
It's a bit of a strange example to make this claim about, since the argument
that that post broke HN's rules is pretty easy.

The balance between upvotes and flags (and moderation) on HN is pretty stable;
it's been this way for years. It doesn't always produce what I think is the
most interesting and important result, either. Probably true for most readers
if not everyone.

~~~
Houshalter
What rule? That it's political? But it's not really. It's not about any
specific candidate or policy, but whether Google censors search results.

"Hillary Clinton is a jerk" would be a political article.

"Google removes 'Hillary Clinton is a jerk' from search results" is not.

>The balance between upvotes and flags (and moderation) on HN is pretty stable

By what metric do you measure stability?

~~~
MichaelGG
The video isn't that strong, really. I'd _love_ for Google to make such huge
mistake, and even think the hint of impropriety here is almost good for the
public: to trust Google/SV less. But it's really not HN quality.

I'm sure if someone did a more comprehensive article on what autocomplete
filters, along with how this might introduce bias even if fairly solid, HN
wouldn't flag it. It could be political if it's comprehensive and clear.
(Perhaps research why "Mein Kampf" shows up when searching images of Trump's
book.) Even an expose on how SV money affects government should be fine. (I
think it was on HN I heard about Google coordinating with the US to
destabilize some place, maybe Libya?)

Dang is being excellent here, allowing the community to decide.

Honestly the only thing is the opaqueness of the flagging process. I was just
caught by surprise after reloading a tab. On its merits it's just a weak
video.

------
ksk
Its hard to believe Google would do that. There is so much risk of being
exposed. As an alternate hypothetical - A Google engineer who has knowledge of
their internal systems could suggest a means of external manipulation, that
would accomplish the same goal, without the risk.

~~~
hidamon
With conflicts of interest like this [http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-
schmidt-startup-working...](http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-
startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/) it's easy to believe Google
would do that.

~~~
valarauca1
Also Google may have violated ethics rules with its hiring practices of Obama
Administration Staff.

[http://thenextweb.com/google/2016/04/29/if-you-want-to-
work-...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2016/04/29/if-you-want-to-work-at-
google-get-a-job-in-us-government/)

------
agildehaus
If you type just "hillary clinton", Benghazi is in the autocomplete, so this
seems like cherry picking to serve a narrative to me.

~~~
SonicSoul
im not getting that. 'hillary clinton ' on Google:

    
    
        twitter
        facebook
        email 
        age
    

on yahoo:

    
    
        email scandal
        indictment
        for president
        criminal charges
    

[http://imgur.com/oxaQLOX](http://imgur.com/oxaQLOX)

~~~
agildehaus
It changes based on who knows how many factors. Benghazi was showing for me
when I typed the message, now it's not.

Google's autocomplete is likely based on recent searches, so it can suggest
things based on very recent events. It will vary wildly.

~~~
SonicSoul
ok that's fine. but if Google is so current with latest searches it's still
pretty weird that "crim.." shows nothing but positive results. surely other
terms are more popular now than "crime bill 1994".

[http://i.imgur.com/vt7rcov.png](http://i.imgur.com/vt7rcov.png)

~~~
agildehaus
Right now, as I type this, typing "hillary clinton crim" brings up "hillary
clinton criminal video" in the autocomplete.

You have NO idea how their autocomplete works, so jumping to conclusions about
Google filtering for positivity, specifically for a candidate, is entirely
stupid.

------
Claudus
This is really concerning, and disappointing if true.

I'd be less concerned if they were also cleaning up autocomplete for the other
candidates, but it appears they are not.

------
sundaisy145
"Brock Turner Cri" also autofills "cricket" and not anything criminal related.
This is likely due to the hoopla around people googling for criminal records
and google penalized a bunch of companies for it a while ago.

------
sayitaintso
I did this autocomplete exercise with several candidates about 6 months ago,
and Hillary-related search autocomplete terms were (by far) the most damning
and amusing.

If this is true (and based on my exercise, it is), I'll be deactivating my
accounts and adding 127.0.0.1 google.com www.google.com accounts.google.com to
my /etc/hosts file.

------
tzs
Their examples of supposed manipulation mostly work the same if you replace
"hillary clinton" with "jeffrey dahmer". In particular, "jeffrey dahmer ind"
suggests "jeffrey dahmer indiana" and "jeffrey dahmer indonesia".

------
ggggtez
If your headline can be answered with "no" then you probably shouldn't post
it.

~~~
mikemoka
episodes like this are the most evident reasons why we need a distributed
internet search engine in our future

------
benmcnelly
Who knows, maybe they got cleared because someone was trolling the suggestion
engine, just because there is heavy logical correlation that suggest higher
rated search terms should be suggested, that doesn't mean there are not other
factors that outweigh it. We don't really know how it works.

I am not being defensive of them, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if it was
true, just that they got caught. It is actually pretty fascinating and scary
how entangled the Google universe and the Government are, and right or wrong,
they are seem to be more invested in their vision of the future more than
financial* gains.

* but money is always a little bit a part of it

------
MichaelBurge
When I was following the primaries, I preferred Bing's tool to Google's
here(just search "primaries" from a US location in either tool). The Google
one seemed overly simplistic, especially earlier when there were more
potential delegates.

I still tend to search with Google, but Bing at least seems to give a more
'unfiltered' view of your query. Google seems to have a lot more heuristics
tweaking things in the background, so I use them for my first search and
switch to Bing if I need to see everything for some oddly specific query.

------
globisdead
I also don't see electoral fraud and exit poll discrepancies talked about as
much anymore:

[https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-
elect...](https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-electoral-
fraud-992ad9e080f6#.tm9sulbiq)

An interesting read from April which continues to be relevant and attributable
to last Tuesday's primaries as well.

------
gefh
I'm glad this guy knows so much about how search engines work. He should start
one, it sounds easy! He just has to map each query to the single, unchanging
answer that's the same for everybody!

------
doener
This is was I get in Berlin, Germany in Incognito mode:

[http://imgur.com/ps3Ahaa](http://imgur.com/ps3Ahaa)

------
ddebernardy
This could also be neighborhood or search history or social network related,
no?

