The US Presidential Election is due in about five weeks so it’s not surprising that relations between the Republican nominee Donald Trump and the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton are close to reaching their boiling point. As the two continue doing their very best to sway the voters in their favor, some baseless allegations are pretty much expected to be made. In fact, one such accusation just came from Waukesha, Wisconsin where Trump was speaking at a Republican political rally. During his speech, Trump made a claim that “Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton”. The Republican presidential candidate is apparently convinced that the Mountain View-based tech giant is trying to indirectly influence the outcome of the upcoming elections by altering the results of its search service.
While he refused to elaborate on the matter, 9to5Google speculates that Trump was probably talking about a recent report from Sputnik News according to which Google tampered with its search results in order to sway up to 3 million votes in Clinton’s favor. If that speculation is correct, it’s not surprising Trump refused to press on the issue further. Namely, Sputnik News is a media agency that’s completely controlled by the Russian government, consequently has its own agenda, and therefore isn’t exactly the most reliable source of news when it comes to reporting on a US tech giant allegedly trying to influence the US Presidential Election in favor of a candidate which Kremlin doesn’t fancy.
Not surprisingly, Google has already denied the allegations of modifying its search results in favor of Hillary Clinton. Back in June, head of the company’s webspam team Matt Cutts described the claims as “simply false” and gave numerous examples of simple Clinton-related searches which list news on the Democratic candidate’s controversies. The tech giant recently faced similar accusations about its autocomplete feature as it apparently refused to suggest searching for controversies about Clinton. However, Google stated that this was a conscious design decision affecting all names. More specifically, the company explained that it wanted its autocomplete algorithm to stop suggesting potentially offensive terms in relation to other people’s names, adding that these changes were already implemented back in 2015.