The US search engine developer has been alleged of favoring Hillary Clinton by manipulating its search results
Lately, the allegations have surfaced which alleged Alphabet Inc.’s Google for favoring one of the presidential candidates –Hillary Clinton. The search engine giant has been blamed for manipulating its search algorithm which favors Ms. Clinton in the predicted-search feature.
On Thursday, a popular pop culture site, Source Fed published a video accusing that the American tech company’s autocomplete facility is biased in favor of Ms. Clinton, the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. Discovery Communications-owned website SourceFed disclosed that an input of “Hillary Clinton cri” into the organization’s search bar yielded suggested questions related to crime bill, crisis as well as crime reform.
It did not include the suggested search “Hillary Clinton crimes,” although the company’s statistics demonstrate that suggested queries are less common than search. A person aware of the autopilot software stated the word “crimes” is a part of the offensive term list.
The person also stated the production of suggested queries is done from numerous factors beyond the searches’ popularity including users’ locations as well as searching histories.
The incident focuses upon a growing role played by technology organizations like Alphabet’s unit in influencing the information as well as news. The Mountain View based company has for a long time period claimed that its tool is unbiased, but for years it has been accused of skewing results to favor its facilities over rivals. In May 2016, Facebook changed how its “trending topics” selected news stories feature is assembled after ex- workers stated the social platform was opposing conservatives in a biased manner. The US social networking organization denied that it had any bias.
In the company’s case, SourceFed stated entering “Hillary Clinton ind” resulted in suggested searches regarding Indiana and India but not “indictment” –although the popularity of the search “indictment” is greater than that of Indiana and India. The latter search refers to possible legal results of her private email server usage while she used to serve as the US secretary of state. Nevertheless, on Friday, a test of that claim showed that “Hillary Clinton indictment for emails” was the first autocomplete suggestion. Hillary has repeatedly stated an indictment would not happen.
Ex- executive of Google Matt Cutts tweeted that the video posted by SourceFed, which got 12 million views on Facebook is “simply false.” He stated often, people use the first name of Ms. Clinton while they are exploring news regarding an indictment. Indeed, entering “Hillary in” resulted in a suggested search of “Hillary indictment.”
“It’s hard for me to believe that Google manually changed autocomplete results .And if they did, it would be completely opposite to their business ethics until now.”
stated Razvan Gavirllas who is CEO of Cognitive SEO, which helps web marketers enhance their website ranking in Google results. Discovery Communications’ spokesman representing Source Fed was not available for sharing views.
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