5 ms·

Did Google Manipulate Search for Hillary? [video]

46 points by makufiru 10y ago

makufiru 10y ago
Additional reading: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-claims-google-involved-hilary-clinton-campaign-1564220 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-cl...
- hidamon 10y ago
  also http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/ http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working...
Claudus 10y ago
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.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
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.
benmcnelly 10y ago
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
sundaisy145 10y ago
"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.
globisdead 10y ago
I also don't see electoral fraud and exit poll discrepancies talked about as much anymore: https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-electoral-fraud-992ad9e080f6#.tm9sulbiq https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-elect... An interesting read from April which continues to be relevant and attributable to last Tuesday's primaries as well.
ggggtez 10y ago
If your headline can be answered with "no" then you probably shouldn't post it.
- douglance 10y ago
  The answer is yes.
- mikemoka 10y ago
  episodes like this are the most evident reasons why we need a distributed internet search engine in our future
ksk 10y ago
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 10y ago
  With conflicts of interest like this http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/ http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working... it's easy to believe Google would do that.
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    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-at-google-get-a-job-in-us-government/ http://thenextweb.com/google/2016/04/29/if-you-want-to-work-...
agildehaus 10y ago
If you type just "hillary clinton", Benghazi is in the autocomplete, so this seems like cherry picking to serve a narrative to me.
- praiseyeezus 10y ago
  Very cherry picked data. +crime seems to be supressed by Google, won't autocomplete for other First Name Last Name +crime searches. Sensational and speculative
- SonicSoul 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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.
gefh 10y ago
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!
ddebernardy 10y ago
This could also be neighborhood or search history or social network related, no?
MichaelGG 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.)
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    Thanks for making HN such a great place!
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
orochi235 10y ago
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.
doener 10y ago
This is was I get in Berlin, Germany in Incognito mode: http://imgur.com/ps3Ahaa http://imgur.com/ps3Ahaa
tzs 10y ago
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".
sayitaintso 10y ago
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.

46 points by makufiru 10y ago

Additional reading: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-claims-google-involved-hilary-clinton-campaign-1564220 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-cl...

hidamon 10y ago
also http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/ http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working...

Claudus 10y ago

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.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

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.

benmcnelly 10y ago

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

sundaisy145 10y ago

"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.

globisdead 10y ago

I also don't see electoral fraud and exit poll discrepancies talked about as much anymore: https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-electoral-fraud-992ad9e080f6#.tm9sulbiq https://medium.com/@spencergundert/hillary-clinton-and-elect... An interesting read from April which continues to be relevant and attributable to last Tuesday's primaries as well.

ggggtez 10y ago

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

douglance 10y ago
The answer is yes.
mikemoka 10y ago
episodes like this are the most evident reasons why we need a distributed internet search engine in our future

ksk 10y ago

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 10y ago
With conflicts of interest like this http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/ http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working... it's easy to believe Google would do that.
- valarauca1 10y ago
  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-at-google-get-a-job-in-us-government/ http://thenextweb.com/google/2016/04/29/if-you-want-to-work-...

agildehaus 10y ago

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

praiseyeezus 10y ago
Very cherry picked data. +crime seems to be supressed by Google, won't autocomplete for other First Name Last Name +crime searches. Sensational and speculative
SonicSoul 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.

gefh 10y ago

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!

ddebernardy 10y ago

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

MichaelGG 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.)
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Thanks for making HN such a great place!
- Houshalter 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.

orochi235 10y ago

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.

doener 10y ago

This is was I get in Berlin, Germany in Incognito mode: http://imgur.com/ps3Ahaa http://imgur.com/ps3Ahaa

tzs 10y ago

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".

sayitaintso 10y ago

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.