Over the past few days, Google has come under fire over its autocomplete predictions in Google Search around former President, Donald Trump. In the wake of the issue, Google updated its autocomplete prediction system to make improvements in these cases. I am sure you all saw the headlines and some of Google’s responses by now and yea, I have not covered it but I posted links to it in my newsletters.
Now that Google confirmed it made some changes to its autocomplete predictions, I figured I’d cover that. Essentially, Google made changes to Search, and I cover those changes. Also, it is hard to get AI to make images of Trump, so I went with a Google colored crystal ball (i.e. predictions).
I should add, Trump also said Google’s results are rigged against him back in 2018.
Google posted on X under its Google Communications channel first talking about the situation that arose. Google said it did not censor or ban a specific term:
Over the past few days, some people on X have posted claims that Search is “censoring” or “banning” particular terms. That’s not happening, and we want to set the record straight.
The posts relate to our Autocomplete feature, which predicts queries to save you time. Autocomplete is just a tool to help you complete a search quickly. Regardless of what predictions it shows at any given moment, you can always search for whatever you want and get easy access to results, images and more.
Here’s what happened, why and how we responded to it.
Then Google said that “it has built-in protections related to political violence” in its autocomplete. Google did not want you to get autocomplete suggestions around doing violence to any political candidate.
But the issue here is that “those systems were out of date.” It was not updated to take into account that there was an assassination attempt on Trump. “After the horrific events in Butler, PA, those predicted queries should have appeared but didn’t,” Google wrote.
