“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,” Google Communications – @Google_Comms said on X.
Stating that the posts relate to the autocomplete feature of Google Search, the company said that autocomplete is ‘just a tool to help you complete a search quickly’. Adding further, Google said “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”.
Google blames bug in autocomplete feature
In its post, Google said that this “particular issue was a bug that spanned the political spectrum, also affecting queries for several past presidents, such as former President Obama, as you can see in the attached image.” “Typing ‘vice president k’ was also showing no predictions, it stated.
Explaining why autocomplete wasn’t providing predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump, Google said that it has built-in protections related to political violence — and those systems were out of date.
“We’ve made an update that has improved these predictions across the board,” Google said adding “Once the issue was flagged, we started working on improvements, and they’re already rolling out,”.
Google on searches for Donald Trump showing news stories related to Kamala Harris
Responding to this, Google said that these labels are automatically generated based on related news topics, and they change over time.
“You can see this happening across a range of topics, like the Olympics, other public figures, companies and more. Our goal is to help people get relevant results for their query.”
As per Google, these types of prediction and labeling systems are algorithmic. “While our systems work very well most of the time, you can find predictions that may be unexpected or imperfect, and bugs will occur,” it stated.
Google concluded its defense stating that “many platforms, including the one we’re posting on now, will show strange or incomplete predictions at various times. For our part, when issues come up, we will make improvements so you can find what you’re looking for, quickly and easily. We appreciate the feedback.”
