Google not altering search results to benefit Hillary Clinton


Someone stumbled upon a preference of Google's not to offer "crimes" as a suggested search term following a person's name. Unsurprisingly, the same sort of folks who think Obama has a secret birth certificate are sharing a conspiracy video.

Vox explains why this is silly:

Choose any famous American who has been accused of a serious crime and Google their name followed by the letters "cri," and in no case does Google suggest the word "crimes." That's true even of people like Kaczynski and Madoff, who are famous only because they faced prosecution for serious crimes.

Apparently, Google has a policy of not suggesting that customers do searches on people's crimes. I have no inside knowledge of why it runs its search engine this way. Maybe Google is just uncomfortable with having an algorithm suggesting that people search for other people's crimes.

In any event, there's no evidence that this is specific to Hillary Clinton, and therefore no reason to think this is a conspiracy by Google to help Clinton win the election.