A funny thing happened yesterday

I was speaking with a colleague of mine at work and we started talking about the US Presidential debate. I was going about how the affair was a bit of a train wreck when he mentioned that he had a huge problem with what Google had done to protect Hillary.

I was, of course, curious as I had never heard of the Google conspiracy to protect Hillary Clinton. To save everyone time; in June SourceFed launched a story that claimed Google efffectively deleted “Hillary Clinton Criminal Record” from their autocomplete system.

It was a very popular story…for about a week however; here I am in September still talking about it.

My colleague was very interested in the story. He was rightly agitated. He believed that Google effectively took sides in the Presidential campaign.

Because I did not know what he was talking about I had him show me the supposed problem with the autocomplete system.

He was right. To this day if you type in “Hillary Clinton criminal record” the phrase does not autocomplete.

CONSPIRACY CONFIRMED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or….it is not something that gets auto-completed. A phrase that does get autocompleted are Hillary Clinton crime reform but, surprisingly not, criminal record.

Since my colleague was interested in the truth we both spent some time looking up how popular the phrase was and compared it with other phrases. We even checked some other search engines to see if the phrase came up.

In less than 45 minutes of research we found out that not only does Hillary Clinton criminal record does not pop up as an autocomplete but, the same also goes for Donald Trump even though he has had a more consistent search pattern for his criminal record for the past five years. The key to our searches was comparing like for like. If Google was taking a side then one side would receive the autocomplete for the same topic and the other would not.

After a relatively short time and, reading any article online during the time of the scandal, showed that this was a false flag. The team at SourceFed were not experts in Google's algorithms but they were good at creating conspiracies. Thier video spent a considerable about of time linking current and former Clinton supporters to Google and even the Pentagon all under the guise of, "not making any allegations."

But that was not the point of this post. The point of this post is show how easily a story based on conjecture and few facts can permeate the populous because, political parties know that we care more about what we feel versus what we know.

The point of the Google search story was to allow your imagination to run free. During our investigation, I asked the question, “Wait, does she actually have an criminal record?” and that is the point of a story like this. Whether it is Google's autocomplete or , Hillary's body double or if she was wearing an earpiece during the first Presidential debate (like she needed one!) the point of these stories are to kick up the dust in your imagination and ride the wave until you've convinced yourself, free from facts, that, "there's something you just don't trust about her.

Those are the tactics of a party that knows they have no real offense. Those are the tactics of desperation. Unfortunately, they work.

Once the Dust Settled

Google replied to the SourceFed claim with the following, "Our autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person's name," a Google spokeswoman said. "Google autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause. Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how autocomplete works." Which holds water because both Hillary's and Donald's Google searches do not autocomplete for the phrase, "criminal record" but do for other, more popular searches.

A CNN article roundly defeats the SourceFed claim by reminding the readers that "Google is really smart. By typing in just "Hillary Clinton," Google presents plenty of autocomplete suggestions with negative connotations, including "email" and "Benghazi." or, in other words, why would they hide "criminal record" and not Benghazi?

Of course, the average voter may not have time to think about that and that's exactly what political parties are hoping for but don't take my word for it, ask Newt.