The Pro-Clinton Google Search Conspiracy

We all have our different views and opinions when it comes to politics, of course. But when it comes to a search engine that millions of people access every day that displays political information that may be biased towards favoring one candidate over the other, this is crossing the line in my opinion. I recently read an article explaining how back in June, a news channel SourceFed created a Youtube video stating that Google was manipulating auto-complete suggestions in its search bar to promote favorable searches relating to Hillary Clinton. Google found this criticism of their website and had to release a statement that explained the policy of suppressing offensive auto-complete suggestions in relation to a person's name. The article went on to state that this controversy didn't end here because Robert Epstein, a Psychologist, conducted his own study on this issue, and the results were released to the public. Epstein, and his team, used proxy servers to minimize bias, and looked at Google auto-suggestions in responses to hundreds of election-related search terms. He came to the conclusion that SourceFed was right because he found it hard to get the Google search bar to portray any negative searches related to Hillary Clinton. Epstein then went on to say, "Bing and Yahoo, on the other hand, often show a number of negative suggestions in response to the same search terms." 

This is a ton of information thrown out in one article, so I am going to do my best at addressing what I think about it, and try to keep my political opinions to the side because it is important to have an open mind when it comes to politics. To start, I find it alarming that Epstein and his team accessed other search engines, Bing and Yahoo, to type Hillary Clinton's name into, and found many negative suggestions towards her. But when they tried to perform the same task on Google, they found nothing to portray any negative searches related to Clinton. Yes, Google is much more popular than Bing or Yahoo, but this does not mean they can take advantage of this popularity on the people that are accessing their website for information. I feel that they should not be able to literally go into their website and take advantage of others by displaying only the political information they want to display. In this case, making no negative suggestions of Clinton come about when people search her name in their search bar. I also understand that Google is a place where people can access the information they want to access, so if they want to find out the negative news about Hillary Clinton, they could simply type this into Google and find many different websites that will give this information to them. This is an article that my opinion can go either way. I am more on the side of believing that Google is taking advantage of their users by displaying a bias towards favoring Clinton, but I understand that it is, ultimately, the users choice on what they want to search. 

As far as my concluding statement goes, in my opinion, no big company that is well known all over the World should incorporate any sort of political pitch, suggestion or bias when it comes to accessing their website, unless it is specifically meant for politics. I am a believer in keeping my political views and opinions quiet when communicating with anyone else because I do not want them to act differently towards me because of this. And this is something that Google may want to keep in mind, and possibly act upon so they do not have any confrontations related to this topic again. As any other company should keep in mind too so they, also, do not have to come out with a statement to address something like this, and have the chance of hindering their public reputation.