It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

Related to the prior post, I came across another accusation that Google search is suppressing search results that are negative for Hillary Clinton. There was a similar report earlier in the summer. The rationale for the accusation is based on the fact that Google is deeply integrated with the current administration (weekly meetings at the White House, extensive exchanges of personnel between Democrats and Google, etc.) and because the Alphabet (holding company of Google) Chairman Eric Schmidt financially supports a pro-Hillary Clinton technology group intended to provide her campaign superior technology enablement.

Did Google Manipulate Search for Hillary? from Source Feed earlier in the summer is probably the most succinct summary I have seen.

The core evidence for the accusation is the difference in autocomplete for each of the three major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo). Autocomplete is, in theory, a mechanism for users to find search phrases that are most frequently used by other searchers. For example, if you type in "Today's we" into Google, the autocomplete offerings are:

Today's weather
Today's weather Atlanta (my current location)
Today's weather forecast

You get very similar results from Bing:

Today's weather
Today's weather forecast
Today's weather report

and from Yahoo:

Today's weather
Today's weather in Atlanta
Today's weather hourly

So far so good. Similar inquiry, similar, but not identical results.

But what happens, remembering that Alphabet chairman Schmidt is funding a tech group that is advising Clinton's campaign on all things digital, when you compare different "Hillary Clinton . . ." searches between the different search engines?

As of 8:51am Friday, September 2nd, here are the autocomplete results:

Google . . . cor

Hillary Clinton cory booker
Hillary Clinton corporate donors
Hillary Clinton corporate tax rates

Bing

Hillary Clinton corruption
Hillary Clinton corrupt
Hillary Clinton corruption list

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton corruption
Hillary Clinton corruption scandals
Hillary Clinton corruption list



Google . . . cri

Hillary Clinton cries
Hillary Clinton crisis of character
Hillary Clinton cried after

Bing

Hillary Clinton criminal investigation
Hillary Clinton criminal charges
Hillary Clinton criminal record

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton crimes
Hillary Clinton criminal
Hillary Clinton criminal charges



Google ind . . .

Hillary Clinton india
Hillary Clinton indiana
Hillary Clinton inddictment reddit

Bing

Hillary Clinton indictment coming
Hillary Clinton indictment update
Hillary Clinton indicted


Yahoo

Hillary Clinton indictment
Hillary Clinton indictment coming
Hillary Clinton indictment coming ny times



Google em . . .

Hillary Clinton email fox news
Hillary Clinton email address
Hillary Clinton emoji

Bing

Hillary Clinton emails
Hillary Clinton emails wikileaks
Hillary Clinton emails investigation

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton emails scandal
Hillary Clinton emails
Hillary Clinton emails update



Google ben . . .

Hillary Clinton benghazi
Hillary Clinton benghazi video
Hillary Clinton benghazi movie

Bing

Hillary Clinton benghazi
Hillary Clinton benghazi summary
Hillary Clinton benghazi what happened


Yahoo

Hillary Clinton benghazi cover up
Hillary Clinton benghazi testimony
Hillary Clinton benghazi what does it matter



Google he . . .

Hillary Clinton height
Hillary Clinton healthcare
Hillary Clinton headquarters

Bing

Hillary Clinton health
Hillary Clinton health issues
Hillary Clinton height


Yahoo

Hillary Clinton health issue
Hillary Clinton health
Hillary Clinton health problems



Google li . . .

Hillary Clinton libya
Hillary Clinton live
Hillary Clinton life

Bing

Hillary Clinton lies
Hillary Clinton liar
Hillary Clinton lies and cover ups

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton lies
Hillary Clinton liar
Hillary Clinton lies and scandals



Google br . . .

Hillary Clinton brother
Hillary Clinton brain tumor
Hillary Clinton broad city

Bing

Hillary Clinton brain damage
Hillary Clinton brain tumor
Hillary Clinton briefing

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton brain damage
Hillary Clinton brain tumor
Hillary Clinton brain clot



Google ra . . .

Hillary Clinton rally
Hillary Clinton raise taxes
Hillary Clinton raleigh

Bing

Hillary Clinton racist
Hillary Clinton racist remarks
Hillary Clinton rally schedule

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton raise taxes on middle class
Hillary Clinton rally schedule
Hillary Clinton rape case



Google af . . .

Hillary Clinton age
Hillary Clinton africa
Hillary Clinton afghanistan

Bing

Hillary Clinton affairs
Hillary Clinton affordable care act
Hillary Clinton affairs list

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton affair
Hillary Clinton affair with woman
Hillary Clinton affairs scandals



Google wh . . .

Hillary Clinton what difference does it make
Hillary Clinton whip
Hillary Clinton who wore it better

Bing

Hillary Clinton whitewater
Hillary Clinton what difference does it make
Hillary Clinton white privilege

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton what difference does it make
Hillary Clinton whitewater scandal
Hillary Clinton whhore of babylon



Google tra . . .

Hillary Clinton trade
Hillary Clinton transcript
Hillary Clinton transparent

Bing

Hillary Clinton travel schedule
Hillary Clinton travelgate
Hillary Clinton track record

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton traitor
Hillary Clinton trail of dead bodies
Hillary Clinton travel gate



Google mon . . .

Hillary Clinton monsanto
Hillary Clinton money raised
Hillary Clinton montage

Bing

Hillary Clinton monsanto
Hillary Clinton monsanto ties
Hillary Clinton monica lewinskey

Yahoo

Hillary Clinton money laundering
Hillary Clinton monsanto connection
Hillary Clinton monica lewinskey

What does it all mean? Clearly, there seems to a strong divergence among the search engines with Bing and Yahoo returning basically similar results which are distinctly harsher than those returned for Google. Google returns virtually no results which are harsh to Clinton.

Why? Perhaps, as importantly, How? How might Google be adjusting its search results? I can't imagine that they have some manual intervention. Too time consuming, too expensive, and (with so many people) too likely to be discovered.

Is it possible that Google is using some sort of sensitivity filter? For example, that they are attaching some weighting to affiliative, warm, affirming searches and displaying those, whereas the other two search engines are simply displaying the actual most searched terms? Possible.

To test that, I ran all the above terms with Donald Trump as the subject, i.e. "Donald Trump cor . . . ", etc. I also ran the same test with Mitt Romney. All three search engines returned reasonably close results to one another for each of these names. Bing and Yahoo still had a slightly harsher set of returns than Google, but they are much closer to one another than when searching on Clinton.

So it seems that there isn't a sensitivity filter.

Is it possible that Google, Bing, and Yahoo have dramatically different users and therefore different searches?

This article sheds a little light on that. But not much. Google users are more male and younger than Bing and Yahoo. Not to indulge in too much stereotyping, but I struggle a little with picturing young male Google users having gentler searchers about Hillary Clinton than older female searchers on Bing and Yahoo.

More of Google searchers are international than are Bing's, so possibly that is a moderating influence, assuming that non-US people might have a more positive view of Clinton than those in the US. Possible, but that doesn't seem particularly convincing.

It is possible that there are demographic differences in the users between Google, Bing, and Yahoo but the data available doesn't seem to make a compelling argument that that would be the difference in the autocompletes.

So we are left with an unexplained discrepancy in terms of autocomplete terms.

While autocomplete might skew the results somewhat, one would assume that the biggest difference would be if the different search engines returned materially different search results. That is a trickier analysis, particularly given that most people only check the first ten results. All three engines might return the same results but one might skew the more positive results to the first page whereas the others might simply rank them by relevance. The shading between the two approaches would likely be quite hard to discern without fairly extensive sampling. I did a minimal test of this hypothesis by running three searches on "scandals", "corruption", and "lies".

On "scandals" and "corruption", Bing and Yahoo seemed to be returning results pretty similar to those in Google.

Interestingly though, when I tried "lies", we revert back to the earlier observed profile. Bing and Yahoo had similar results to one another and all the first articles were essentially a listing or an investigation of particular lies. Google, however, had four articles which were efforts to refute reports about Clinton's lies. I.e. the displayed results were clearly far more positive to Clinton than those from Bing and Yahoo.

That's about as far as I can go.

The facts seem to indicate a very strong skew on the part of Google towards downplaying negative news about Clinton in their autocomplete compared to Bing and Yahoo.

On a sample base of three ("scandals", "corruption" and "lies"), it does appear that there are certain search terms that skew favorably towards Clinton in the Google search engine but not in Bing or Yahoo.

As Churchill described Russia, "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."