Politics

Google Responds To Allegations Search Excluded Trump From Presidential Candidates

Google Search Box: Gil C/shutterstock.com, Donald Trump: Joseph Sohm/shutterstock.com

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Ted Goodman Contributor
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Complaints emerged early this week that when users punched “presidential candidates” into Google’s search engine, the results excluded Donald Trump, who is the Republican nominee for president.

Google acted fast to resolve the discrepancy and blamed it on a “technical bug” in the information mapping system that is used to filter top search results.

A Google spokesperson said, “We found a technical bug in Search where only the presidential candidates participating in an active primary election were appearing in a Knowledge Graph result. Because the Republican and Libertarian primaries have ended, those candidates did not appear. This bug was resolved early this morning.”

When users searched for “presidential candidates” the search query returned the names of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton along with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Trump and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson were not included.

Concerned users took to Twitter with screenshots, asking why Donald Trump was not recognized as a candidate for president.

Google has been accused of anti-conservative bias in the past, from allegations that they’re search algorithms are manipulated to hide negative stories about Clinton, to questions as to why Trump campaign emails end up in spam folders for Gmail users.

While Google insists it is non-biased and that they do not manipulate their search algorithms to favor any one candidate for elected office, its CEO, Eric Schmidt, has been on the DNC’s Democratic Victory Task Force since 2014.

News of the discrepancy by Google follows a long line of accusations against Silicon Valley firms that they are engaged in a campaign against Donald Trump and conservative news. TheDCNF Googled “presidential candidates” shortly after noon eastern time today, and it appeared that the ‘bug’ had been fixed. Trump and Johnson appears with Clinton and Stein, and Sanders has been removed from the list. Sorry, Bernie Bros.

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