This past weekend, some users began reporting odd responses from Google's search engine and its "type-ahead" feature with which it attempts to guess what you're searching for and offers to fill in the rest of the search bar for you. They reported that while it seemed to be functioning normally otherwise, if they typed in "President Donald" the option of "Trump" was not offered to complete the search. Instead, Google was offering "President Donald Duck" or "President Donald Regan" (whoever that is), along with other choices. SpaceX owner Elon Musk noticed the same thing and highlighted it on social media, quickly drawing Google's attention. He suspected that Google was attempting to suppress information about Trump, including the recent assassination attempt on his life. But when CBS News asked Google about it, they claimed that the issue was caused by unspecified "anomalies" and they were definitely not trying to tamper in the election. (Perish the thought.) They also claimed that the same anomaly was observed when users typed in "Vice President K."
Billionaire Elon Musk on Sunday claimed that Google has a "search ban" on former President Donald Trump, posting to his social media service X an image of a search box with the words "President Donald" typed into it. Below the box, autocomplete suggested "Donald Duck" and "President Donald Regan" as potential search terms, but not "President Donald Trump."
Google told CBS MoneyWatch the issue is due to "anomalies" that are causing autocomplete not to work as intended "for some searches about the names of several past presidents and the current vice president." For instance, typing the words "Vice President K" into Google's search box on Monday returned several results including "William R. King" (a VP in 1853) and Vice President Kakegurui (an anime character) but didn't suggest "Vice President Kamala Harris."
Google didn't specify the anomalies, but said they were technical in nature and that the company hasn't taken any manual actions to change autocomplete.
I will confess that I was otherwise occupied while this was going on so I didn't get the chance to try it myself. But if this was really happening and it was caused by an anomaly, somebody at Google must have gotten to work on it pretty quickly. I tried the "President Donald" trick this morning and "Trump" was the first choice at the top of the list that showed up. It also offered "President Donald Duck," but he was a bit further down the list. Similarly, my search for "Vice President" didn't even need the letter "K" attached before it was already offering me Kamala Harris as option number once, complete with a photo of her and a link to her Wikipedia page.
With all of that said, particularly given Google/Alphabet's recent history and well-documented incidents of left-wing bias, the initial report didn't surprise me at all. So this morning I was left with some questions. Was this truly just an anomalous ghost in the machine that popped up and was fixed after users pointed it out? Was it something that was intentionally inserted and only "corrected" after the finger-pointing began? If the latter, they may have "fixed" the type-ahead feature, but what else is going on in the background that isn't so easily discerned?
Keep in mind that Google has been developing its own Artificial Intelligence chatbot named Bard, now called Gemini. It has demonstrated many of the same issues we've encountered with OpenAI's ChatGPT. The answers they give on any number of topics skew decidedly to the left. And the two worlds are colliding, with Google now incorporating an AI feature into its search results "to improve your user experience." These bots make mistakes at times, it's true. But if they were going to leave out some pieces of data in their responses while being more inclusive of others, which way do you suppose they would lean?
Feel free to call me a conspiracy theorist if you wish. (You would hardly be the first to do so.) But some of these patterns I've noted here have been repeating themselves consistently. You can click on the "Artificial Intelligence" topic tab at the bottom of this article and browse some of my previous reporting on the subject. I've detailed the research work of others and conducted my own experiments with the chatbots at length. There is a man behind the curtain here, reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz. I'm not sure exactly what he's up to or what the long-term game plan might be, but I'm very confident that he's a liberal.
