Google was responding to accusations from Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. and other prominent Republican figures that the search engine is meddling in the election with its autocomplete results.
On Sunday evening, several X users posted photograph When you type “assassination attempt” into Google’s search engine, the website only shows autocomplete results for assassination attempts on former presidents Ronald Reagan and Bob Marley, but not the July 14 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Even when luck When I typed “assassination attempt on President Trump” into Chrome’s incognito mode, no autocomplete results appeared. However, when I clicked “Enter” on the results, several recent news articles about the incident in Butler, Pennsylvania appeared.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, Posts When searching for “President Donald,” a photo of “President Donald Duck” was listed as a candidate before “President Donald Trump.”
“Wow, Google just banned searches for Donald Trump,” Musk posted. “Election interference?”
“It’s probably just a coincidence that Alphabet (Google) employees were Biden’s largest donors,” he said. Ironic In another X post.
luck – I was unable to replicate Musk’s results when searching in incognito mode in Chrome. Autocomplete showed no predictions for searches of “President Donald” or “President Trump.” Autocomplete also showed no predictions for “President Joe” or “President Biden.”
Several prominent Republicans were infuriated by the autocomplete results on X, and immediately Accused Google is “gaslighting” Americans and trying to influence the 2024 presidential election.
“Big Tech is trying to interfere in our election again to help Kamala Harris,” Trump’s son says Donald Trump “We all know this was deliberate election interference by Google. It’s so despicable,” Junior wrote on X.
Google luck The company said it has not taken any “manual action” against autocomplete predictions and will “work to improve” the autocomplete feature.
Regarding queries about assassination attempts, Google’s systems “have protections against autocomplete predictions related to political violence, and were working as intended before this horrific event,” the spokesperson wrote. luck. “We are working on improvements to keep our systems more up to date.”
Regarding the “Donald Duck” search Musk highlighted, a spokesperson said that “autocomplete is not currently working as intended” for searches of the names of past presidents and the current vice president.
“We are investigating these anomalies and working on improvements that we hope to roll out soon,” the spokesperson said. “Our autocomplete system is dynamic, so predictions change based on common and trending queries.”
He is an expert in online search. Search Engine Roundtableis a news service about search engines. luck Google’s response “makes sense”
“Wherever you search, Google will show it, but it won’t ‘suggest’ in its autocomplete that you should use violence against politicians,” he said.
Imagine if typing “true assassination attempt” into Google brought up “Trump assassination attempt” when no assassination attempt actually occurred, Schwartz said. “That would incite violence.”
But since the attempt was real, he added, Google should offer autocomplete for the sentence — and maybe “they just didn’t update their filters” and nothing more sinister, he said.
