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Comment by airza | Hacker News Reader

Is there someone that google WILL autocomplete "criminal" for? I tried a lot of people, including those who have been convicted of crimes, and it seems to refuse to do so. (E.G Mike Tyson, John Gotti, as well as politicians like Nixon, George W Bush, and even hitler.)

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Yeah, this is a garbage article, "criminal" and "indictment" don't autocomplete for anyone. Probably so Google doesn't get sued for accusing an innocent person of being a criminal with autocomplete.

But.. I type "Hilarry ind" (to see if I get "Hillary Indiana" like the example) and I get immediatly "Hillary indictment". It seems that search results are very hard to reproduce and compare, given that they are very tailored, is this the case?

Interesting. It did seem a bit heavy handed, which made me wonder if something else was going on (and I figured by posting here I'd find out :).

For what it's worth, I _can_ get indictment to autocomplete for others (e.g. try "vick indi").

Also, I'm guessing this whole story would have gone nowhere if Google had just said "we filter labels like criminal" rather than claiming they only filter "offensive or inappropriate content".

Hmm, vick indi works but michael vick indi doesn't. Maybe it's doing it based on a name detecting NLP component.

"Clinton cri" and "Clinton indic" work too. Looks like this is a really basic filter that doesn't allow criminalish words to be added to full names.

Many people responding to this "story" are exhibiting classic confirmation bias. They're putting in searches that would confirm their existing belief that Hillary is "crooked" or that the system is rigged instead of ruling out other possibilities.

If you can show this happens for Hillary and not for 10 other people, that would be much more convincing than showing 10 times that it happens for Hillary.

NY Times has a fun interactive puzzle that demonstrates this bias: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick...

yes, that was more or less the idea of my comment :P

That should have been Google's only comment on the matter. I wonder if they didn't even think to try such a simple test.

Pee Wee Gaskins

Life imitates art. Hooli Scrub.

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