Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images via The Blaze

Following a post from Elon Musk, social media users are accusing Google of election interference, pointing out that its search box’s Autocomplete function appeared to omit queries regarding the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump. The AllSides staff conducted an analysis that appeared to verify the claim.

While AllSides has not conducted bias analysis of Google’s search engine, our bias analysis of Google News found 63% of articles that appeared on the news aggregator over a 2-week period in 2023 were from media outlets on the left; just 6% of articles were from sources on the right. AllSides rates Google News as Lean Left overall.

Many news outlets on the right and Newsweek (Center bias) covered the claims about Google search’s Autocomplete, but AllSides has not found additional coverage from the center or outlets on the left.
Per Newsweek and The New York Post (Lean Right bias), a Google spokesperson denied taking any "manual action" on its Autocomplete feature that would have caused it to omit suggestions about Trump’s assassination.

The Details

Google’s Autocomplete feature is a feature of Google’s search engine that predicts what users may be searching for as they’re typing. Per Google, it helps users “save time by allowing them to quickly complete the search they already intended to do,” and “doesn’t simply display the most common queries on a given topic.”

Users have reported that when searching “Trump assassination attempt” or “assassination attempt on Trump” Google’s Autocomplete feature does not show any results pertinent to the recent failed assassination attempt on the former president.

Several AllSides team members of different biases across the spectrum and around the country have reported the same experience.

When searching “assassination attempt on Trump,” Google suggested queries related to the 1950 assassination attempt on former President Harry Truman. When completing the query with Trump’s full name, Google did not suggest any possible searches. AllSides tested these queries while in Incognito Mode so that personal account history wouldn’t impact the results.

Alternatively, when leading with the keyword “Trump,” Google’s Autocomplete suggestions turn off once the letters “as” are added to the query.

AllSides’ CTO noted that the factors Google uses to rank search results may partially explain the lack of Autocomplete suggestions. Google boosts pages that are more widely “backlinked,” meaning many other webpages include links to the page. 

Since the assassination occurred very recently, and many of the search results are breaking news stories, there hasn’t been much time for other pages to backlink to them. On the other hand, pages about historical assassinations likely have more backlinks and get a boost in rankings.

However, when AllSides measured the query “Truman assassination attempt” against “Trump assassination attempt,” Google returned 662,000 results for the Truman query and 182,000,000 for Trump, indicating that there likely isn’t a larger number of authoritative sources on the Truman assassination attempt. This would presumably counterbalance the effect of the lack of backlinks to make Trump assassination results more prominent.

Additionally, the fact that autofill suggestions disappear after “trump as” is typed indicates that the suggestions are being intentionally removed. This could be due to Google’s policy of avoiding suggestions that would expose users to violent content. Attempting to search for other queries related to the upcoming election, such as “Vote for Kamala” or “Vote for Trump,” also do not produce Autocomplete suggestions.

Notable critics of Google have included Donald Trump Jr. and X owner Elon Musk.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) said on Sunday he’ll be making an “official inquiry” into Google on the matter this week.

The Google spokesperson, denying any manual action had taken place to remove Trump assassination suggestions, also told The New York Post and Newsweek that Google’s systems include “protections” against Autocomplete predictions “associated with political violence.”

“We're working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date. Of course, Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to. Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high quality information—we connected them with helpful results, and will continue to do so,” the spokesperson added. 

How The Media Covered It

Many outlets on the right covered the story; Newsweek (Center bias) was the only Center-rated outlet AllSides found to cover the story. AllSides did not find coverage from any sources on the left as of this writing.

Outlets on the right that covered the story included: The Blaze (Right bias), Breitbart (Right bias), The Daily Caller (Right bias), Daily Mail (Right bias), Fox Business (Lean Right bias), Fox News (Right bias), Just The News (Lean Right bias), The New York Post (Lean Right bias), The New York Sun (Right bias), Newsmax (Lean Right bias), Outkick (Lean Right bias), The Post Millennial (Right bias), The Telegraph (Lean Right bias), Townhall (Right bias), and Zerohedge (Lean Right bias).

Several of them tested the queries themselves and verified the results AllSides also encountered above. Many also referenced the narrative often mentioned by conservatives that suggest Big Tech may be conspiring to influence the 2024 election.

Is Google Biased?

There’s nothing proving that Google is intentionally blocking searches about the assassination attempt on Trump. But AllSides has noted bias from the company in other cases.

AllSides has not analyzed the bias of Google’s search engine, but rates Google News as Lean Left. A late 2023 analysis of Google News results for political queries and general suggestions of news content from Google News curated 63% of articles from outlets AllSides rates as on the left and just 6% of articles from the right. In the days leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, AllSides found the search term “election” returned no Google News results from Center-, Lean Right- or Right-rated media outlets. 

AllSides’ bias analysis was covered by several prominent media outlets from the right, but none from the left.

In order to consume a more balanced news diet, you can use the AllSides Balanced Search to sort news coverage by biases of outlets.

The AllSides News Aggregator Bias Chart shows most online news aggregators Lean Left.

Several members of the AllSides team contributed to this piece: Andy Gorel, News Editor and Bias Analyst (Center bias), Henry A. Brechter, AllSides Editor-in-chief (Center Bias), Julie Mastrine, Director of Marketing and Media Bias Ratings (Lean Right Bias), Evan Wagner, News Editor and Bias Analyst (Lean Left bias), and Kai Lincke, Content Intern (Lean Left bias).

Donald Trump, Trump Assassination Attempt, Google, Google Bias, Big Tech, Elections, Media Bias Alert, Technology