6 ms·

This is not "research" period. Using one arbitrary search comparison to draw conclusions about the nature of a system that processes billions of queries a day i

This is not "research" period. Using one arbitrary search comparison to draw conclusions about the nature of a system that processes billions of queries a day is pretty weak. Additionally, I don't get the same results you do. "hillary clinton e" does not bring up emails, nor does "donald trump e" bring up emails (the first results I see are election, education, england visit, ex wife). I'm not ruling out the possibility that google actually is manipulating search results, but this is not proof of that.

bodono 7y ago
Try "hillary clinton emai". From a fresh chrome session in NYC I get nothing, not a single autocomplete result. On the other hand "donald trump emai" gets: * donald trump email * donald trump email address * donald trump email list * donald trump email newsletter * donald trump email list signup And just to drive the point home I tried "root_axis emai" and got "root_axis email". Try anyone else and you get similar results, 'barack obama emai', 'george bush emai', etc etc. So yes, this is proof that the results are scrubbed for Clinton email.
- mrep 7y ago
  Seems to go both ways though as I'm not getting any auto completion results for "donald trump stormy daniels" either. I'm guessing they scrub things that are highly sensationalized in the news.
  - bodono 7y ago
    "stormy daniels" doesn't get any autocomplete results for me even without trump, my guess is this is more about adult search terms getting blacklisted rather than political. For example "donald trump e j" gets "donald trump e jean carroll", E Jean Carroll recently accused Trump of a serious sexual assault and this is autocompleting.
- scott_s 7y ago
  I got curious and tried the names of a bunch of public figures. Some of "<first and last name> e" yielded "email" as the suggestion. But these did not: elizabeth holmes, tom jones, tom cruise, brad pitt, gwyneth paltrow, roger federer, will smith, jimmy carter. Since Hillary Clinton is not unique, then it's not proof that her results are treated differently.
  - bodono 7y ago
    They all work fine for me, e.g., 'tom jones emai' -> 'tom jones email', only Clinton didn't.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    None of those other people were involved in major stories with email in the headline. If you look at the actual results, you'll see that it doesn't make any sense to not get suggestions for "Hillary Clinton email". Compare these results: * https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hillary%20clinton%20email https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hillary%20clinton%20em... * https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=will%20smith%20email https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=will%20smith%20email
  - buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
    Why would you expect “brad Pitt email” to be something that auto completes? You would, on the other hand expect “Hillary Clinton email” to auto complete because there was a huge controversy about it. I’m not saying google is manipulating auto complete intentionally (though they might be), I’m just saying your counter examples are irrelevant. It would be like “Donald trump Russia” NOT auto completing then someone saying “but neither does Taylor swift Russia, so we’re good.”
    - scott_s 7y ago
      The poster claimed Hillary Clinton was unique, meaning the only person that applied to. For me, she was not. Since she's not unique, then her being unique can't be used as evidence. Claiming that she's unusual, since you expect it to work for her based on stories written about her is a different claim.
- root_axis 7y ago
  When I type "Donald Trump R" (or Ru or Russ etc) no autocomplete results contain the word Russia despite plenty of news coverage. When I type "Donald Trump Epstein" no autocomplete results. Must be a conspiracy by google to protect the president... or drawing conclusions based on individually cherry-picked autocomplete results is like drawing conclusions from numerology.
  - bodono 7y ago
    The same thing happens with Russia for "barack obama rus" "hillary clinton rus", "george bush rus", etc. - none autocomplete for me despite the fact that there was lots of news items relating those politicians and russia during their careers. However Clinton is the only one that doesn't appear to autocomplete for email, suggesting that it is specific to her. When I type "donald trump epstei" I get "theo epstein donald trump" (for some reason the word order is flipped), which would suggest to me that epstein is not blocked in the way you suggest, and it's just that not enough people are searching that term, or that the autocomplete algorithm hasn't caught up to the latest news on epstein and trump yet. However "donald trump e j" does autocomplete to "donald trump e jean carroll", which is relating to a serious scandal for the president. This isn't cherry picked I'm afraid, it really does look like intentional blocking of "hillary clinton email" from autocomplete.
    - root_axis 7y ago
      None of those people had a gigantic Russia scandal though, Trump did, so you must still account for this unexplained aberration. If anything, the Trump/Russia scandal had more coverage than the Hillary e-mail scandal, so it's an even more difficult aberration to explain. Also, if I type "hillary e" I get "Hillary Emails PDF" as an autocomplete suggestion. If I type "clinton e" I get several email suggestions "clinton email PDF" ,"clinton email film", "clinton email FOIA", "clinton email download". Please include these confounding results in your analysis
      - bodono 7y ago
        Actually both Obama and Clinton had major stories relating to Russia including the failed 'reset', the annexation of Crimea during the Obama administration, obama's "red line" of using chemical weapons in syria which was circumvented by russia, and Obama telling Mitt Romney that Russia was not a threat in the 2012 presidential debates. So yes, they have huge stories relating to russia. And your autocomplete results just bolster the evidence that 'hillary clinton email' has been made a special case and is not organic!
- metabagel 7y ago
  Try news.google.com. It works there.
Excel_Wizard 7y ago
"hillary clinton emails" is a topic that is widely published around the web. Autocomplete should pick up on this and recommend it. I even went to the trouble of typing "hillary clinton emai" and no autocomplete suggestions were brought up. It is a rather suspicious result. Suspicious enough that it is hard not to imagine a deliberate act is behind it. I admit that I don't have any proof.
ar-jan 7y ago
That's the point: this is not research, but whatever is going on at Google, the explanation has to account for examples like these. It's simply one observation that you cannot discount. I just tried searching again a few times with new private windows, and "email" alternates between first and fourth suggestion for trump. But the more important point is the absence of the suggestion for clinton: we know it's been in the news extensively, we know people searched for this phrase a lot, and now "email" has been removed from the suggestions only for Clinton. I tried searching a few more U.S. politicians, and for all of them "e" autosuggests "email" somewhere between first and fourth place. So the complete absence for Clinton does not look like a generic algorithm change.
- root_axis 7y ago
  When I type "Donald Trump R" I don't see any autocomplete for "Donald Trump Russia" despite plenty of news coverage on this topic. So what? This isn't proof of anything. I can indeed discount "one observation" because it is literally a single search query used to draw a conclusion about an insanely complex system that processes billions of queries a day. I am open to the possibility that google is manipulating search results, but to demonstrate this you need to account for many other possible search queries that produce seemingly unexpected results. Dissecting one politically charged query and claiming it is proof of google's malfeasance doesn't make sense. Anyone can string together a couple strange query results to support their own subjective narrative about what should appear and the supposed sinister machinations behind the query results.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Right, and further observations show that it's not unique to Hillary Clinton. This means you can discount the claim since it uses cherry picked data.
  - exolymph 7y ago
    But we still haven't answered the actual question: Why doesn't "email" come up in autocomplete for Hillary Clinton, when it clearly should?

bodono 7y ago

Try "hillary clinton emai". From a fresh chrome session in NYC I get nothing, not a single autocomplete result. On the other hand "donald trump emai" gets: * donald trump email * donald trump email address * donald trump email list * donald trump email newsletter * donald trump email list signup And just to drive the point home I tried "root_axis emai" and got "root_axis email". Try anyone else and you get similar results, 'barack obama emai', 'george bush emai', etc etc. So yes, this is proof that the results are scrubbed for Clinton email.

mrep 7y ago
Seems to go both ways though as I'm not getting any auto completion results for "donald trump stormy daniels" either. I'm guessing they scrub things that are highly sensationalized in the news.
- bodono 7y ago
  "stormy daniels" doesn't get any autocomplete results for me even without trump, my guess is this is more about adult search terms getting blacklisted rather than political. For example "donald trump e j" gets "donald trump e jean carroll", E Jean Carroll recently accused Trump of a serious sexual assault and this is autocompleting.
scott_s 7y ago
I got curious and tried the names of a bunch of public figures. Some of "<first and last name> e" yielded "email" as the suggestion. But these did not: elizabeth holmes, tom jones, tom cruise, brad pitt, gwyneth paltrow, roger federer, will smith, jimmy carter. Since Hillary Clinton is not unique, then it's not proof that her results are treated differently.
- bodono 7y ago
  They all work fine for me, e.g., 'tom jones emai' -> 'tom jones email', only Clinton didn't.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  None of those other people were involved in major stories with email in the headline. If you look at the actual results, you'll see that it doesn't make any sense to not get suggestions for "Hillary Clinton email". Compare these results: * https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hillary%20clinton%20email https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hillary%20clinton%20em... * https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=will%20smith%20email https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=will%20smith%20email
- buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
  Why would you expect “brad Pitt email” to be something that auto completes? You would, on the other hand expect “Hillary Clinton email” to auto complete because there was a huge controversy about it. I’m not saying google is manipulating auto complete intentionally (though they might be), I’m just saying your counter examples are irrelevant. It would be like “Donald trump Russia” NOT auto completing then someone saying “but neither does Taylor swift Russia, so we’re good.”
  - scott_s 7y ago
    The poster claimed Hillary Clinton was unique, meaning the only person that applied to. For me, she was not. Since she's not unique, then her being unique can't be used as evidence. Claiming that she's unusual, since you expect it to work for her based on stories written about her is a different claim.
root_axis 7y ago
When I type "Donald Trump R" (or Ru or Russ etc) no autocomplete results contain the word Russia despite plenty of news coverage. When I type "Donald Trump Epstein" no autocomplete results. Must be a conspiracy by google to protect the president... or drawing conclusions based on individually cherry-picked autocomplete results is like drawing conclusions from numerology.
- bodono 7y ago
  The same thing happens with Russia for "barack obama rus" "hillary clinton rus", "george bush rus", etc. - none autocomplete for me despite the fact that there was lots of news items relating those politicians and russia during their careers. However Clinton is the only one that doesn't appear to autocomplete for email, suggesting that it is specific to her. When I type "donald trump epstei" I get "theo epstein donald trump" (for some reason the word order is flipped), which would suggest to me that epstein is not blocked in the way you suggest, and it's just that not enough people are searching that term, or that the autocomplete algorithm hasn't caught up to the latest news on epstein and trump yet. However "donald trump e j" does autocomplete to "donald trump e jean carroll", which is relating to a serious scandal for the president. This isn't cherry picked I'm afraid, it really does look like intentional blocking of "hillary clinton email" from autocomplete.
  - root_axis 7y ago
    None of those people had a gigantic Russia scandal though, Trump did, so you must still account for this unexplained aberration. If anything, the Trump/Russia scandal had more coverage than the Hillary e-mail scandal, so it's an even more difficult aberration to explain. Also, if I type "hillary e" I get "Hillary Emails PDF" as an autocomplete suggestion. If I type "clinton e" I get several email suggestions "clinton email PDF" ,"clinton email film", "clinton email FOIA", "clinton email download". Please include these confounding results in your analysis
    - bodono 7y ago
      Actually both Obama and Clinton had major stories relating to Russia including the failed 'reset', the annexation of Crimea during the Obama administration, obama's "red line" of using chemical weapons in syria which was circumvented by russia, and Obama telling Mitt Romney that Russia was not a threat in the 2012 presidential debates. So yes, they have huge stories relating to russia. And your autocomplete results just bolster the evidence that 'hillary clinton email' has been made a special case and is not organic!
metabagel 7y ago
Try news.google.com. It works there.

Excel_Wizard 7y ago

"hillary clinton emails" is a topic that is widely published around the web. Autocomplete should pick up on this and recommend it. I even went to the trouble of typing "hillary clinton emai" and no autocomplete suggestions were brought up. It is a rather suspicious result. Suspicious enough that it is hard not to imagine a deliberate act is behind it. I admit that I don't have any proof.

ar-jan 7y ago

That's the point: this is not research, but whatever is going on at Google, the explanation has to account for examples like these. It's simply one observation that you cannot discount. I just tried searching again a few times with new private windows, and "email" alternates between first and fourth suggestion for trump. But the more important point is the absence of the suggestion for clinton: we know it's been in the news extensively, we know people searched for this phrase a lot, and now "email" has been removed from the suggestions only for Clinton. I tried searching a few more U.S. politicians, and for all of them "e" autosuggests "email" somewhere between first and fourth place. So the complete absence for Clinton does not look like a generic algorithm change.

root_axis 7y ago
When I type "Donald Trump R" I don't see any autocomplete for "Donald Trump Russia" despite plenty of news coverage on this topic. So what? This isn't proof of anything. I can indeed discount "one observation" because it is literally a single search query used to draw a conclusion about an insanely complex system that processes billions of queries a day. I am open to the possibility that google is manipulating search results, but to demonstrate this you need to account for many other possible search queries that produce seemingly unexpected results. Dissecting one politically charged query and claiming it is proof of google's malfeasance doesn't make sense. Anyone can string together a couple strange query results to support their own subjective narrative about what should appear and the supposed sinister machinations behind the query results.
bduerst 7y ago
Right, and further observations show that it's not unique to Hillary Clinton. This means you can discount the claim since it uses cherry picked data.
- exolymph 7y ago
  But we still haven't answered the actual question: Why doesn't "email" come up in autocomplete for Hillary Clinton, when it clearly should?