Trump pushes conspiracy that Google suppresses negative news about Clinton

Donald Trump on Wednesday revived an old conspiracy that Google is in the tank for Hillary Clinton.

“The Google poll has us leading Hillary Clinton by two points nationwide, and that’s despite the fact that Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton,” the Republican presidential nominee said in Wisconsin Wednesday, according to the New York Times. “How about that?”

It's an old theory — and one that has been debunked. Google was accused of suppressing negative news about the Democratic presidential nominee in June after the conservative site SourceFed posted a video about Google's autocorrect feature. Google's autofilled results, the video claimed, didn't complete "Hillary Clinton cr" with "Hillary Clinton criminal investigation," for example. Search engines Bing and Yahoo had different results.

Mashable tested the claims against Google's autofill and search features in June and found that the search engine didn't seem to suppress anything.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Trump's claims this week also confused Google search results with its autocomplete option. Even if Google's autocomplete doesn't offer to search for "Hillary Clinton criminal investigation," that wouldn't suppress any information for that search term.

"Autocomplete predictions aren’t search results and don’t limit what you can search for," Google's VP of product management for search, Tamar Yehoshua, wrote in a blog post in response to the claims in June. "You can still perform whatever search you want to, and of course, regardless of what you search for, we always strive to deliver the most relevant results from across the web."

In response to the claims about autocomplete in particular, a Google spokesperson at that time told Mashable:

"Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause. 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."

Trump's reference to the Google autocomplete conspiracy was included in his prepared remarks Wednesday, according to the New York Times.