Officials at Google are denying accusations that it has been skewing its auto-fill search algorithm to hide results that are negative about Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, saying that the programming does not show disparaging results along with any person's name.
"Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause," a representative said in a statement to
The Washington Times. "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."
On Thursday, the news site
SourceFed released a video claiming that the website's autocomplete fill function had been altered to favor Clinton. For example, when a user types in "Hillary Clinton cri" into Google, the results returned suggest "Hillary Clinton crime reform" and then "Hillary Clinton crime bill 1994."
But with other search engines such as Bing, the phrase returns results including "Hillary Clinton criminal charges" among the top results, and results for other candidates remained the same,
reports The Hill.
"The intention is clear," said SourceFed's Matt Lieberman in the video."Google is burying potential searches for terms that could have hurt Hillary Clinton in the primary elections over the past several months by manipulating recommendations on their site."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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