Google autocomplete search recommendations will be removed by the multinational technology company ahead of the presidential election.
The reason is Google autocomplete search predictions “could be interpreted as claims for or against any candidate or political party.” The company will also eliminate statements about voting methods and the status of voting sites as well as the legitimacy of US elections including its security.
Google autocomplete suggests searches according to the words being typed by a user in the search box in a Chrome browser or on Google.com.
“We want to be very careful about those sorts of predictions,” said David Graff, Google’s senior director of trust and safety. “This election, people will have strong opinions, and given the backdrop of Covid-19, the change with elections is to be more conservative in terms of queries," he said during a press call ahead of the announcement Thursday.
The new policy comes as Google, among other companies like Facebook and Twitter which are trying to address misinformation, gears up for the upcoming presidential election.
Google presented examples of phrases it will ban, such as a prediction that shows “donate to” any party or candidate, or those like “you can vote by phone” as well as “you can’t vote by phone.”
“It’s been fairly unprecedented — the scale of information challenges particularly with Covid,” said Cathy Edwards, vice president of engineering at Google. “We don’t want to have policy changes on Election Day,” she added. “That’s a goal for us, certainly.”
Moreover, the company promoted its “Intelligence Desk,” which is a team of analysts monitoring news events 24 hours a day. The same desk is tracing claims about Covid-19 treatments. They will thoroughly monitor the Election Day to prevent too early election outcomes from appearing in search.
Google searches
A study released in August shows that Google searches for anxiety info soared in the US during the early phase of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to researchers from the Qualcomm Institute at the University of California San Diego, Google searches for anxiety surged in March, when the coronavirus pandemic was first declared a national emergency.
Based on the study published in JAMA Network Open, the top keywords are “anxiety” or “panic” in combination with “attack,” such as “panic attack,” “signs of anxiety attack,” “anxiety attack symptoms,” and so forth.
Researchers who collaborated with Johns Hopkins University, Barnard College and the Institute for Disease Modeling, anxiety-related searches were around 11% higher than usual over the 58 days after President Donald Trump announced a national emergency on March 13.
“In practical terms, over the first 58 days of the COVID-19 pandemic there were an estimated 3.4 million total searches related to severe acute anxiety in the United States. In fact, searches for anxiety and panic attacks were the highest they’ve ever been in over 16 years of historical search data,” Benjamin Althouse, a principal scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling, said in a statement.
Anxiety-related searches rose around key news events, increasing 17% above normal from March 16, when national social distancing guidelines were first announced, to April 14, a few days after the US surpassed Italy for the most deaths.
