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Okay. "Attempted Assassination of Donald" - autocompletes were "wiki," "first attempted assassination of US President," and references to various presidential assassinations. Is the Google wickedness here that it doesn't autocomplete to "Donald Trump" first? I suppose it's possible that Google engineers intentionally removed "Trump" from the predictions, but the reason for doing this eludes me - people would then be diverted from finding out about an attempted assassination of Donald Trump? Working with LLMs and other token predictors quite a lot, I find more prosaic technical explanations more likely than whatever opaque partisan SEO scheme this is supposed to imply.
When I try "Attempted Assassination of Trum", the first autocomplete is "Trump" (guess those Google engineers weren't vigilant enough!) and the second is "Truman."
ETA: While generally I don't feel obligated to prove anything to bad faith trolls accusing me of lying, I did find myself puzzled that I was getting different results than what other people claimed. I redid them and realized I'd missed the top results were earlier searches in my own search history (with a different icon). So when I used a private tab I got mostly the same Trump-less results as others did. (Still don't see Prince Alfred or Queen Victoria, though - @AshLael. Maybe regional differences?) Still not convinced someone deliberately went in and removed all Trump-related assassination queries, but I will be interested in trying again in a few days and seeing what happens.
Loathe as I am to do it I have to defend Google here. A more thorough examination suggests they are blocking nearly all autocomplete suggestions good and bad related to Trump and Harris. My guess: an attempt to be seen as NOT trying to influence the election. A list of searches that seem to be blacklisted by autocomplete: “trump felon/felony” “trump sexual assault” “trump january 6” “trump lies” “trump crimes” “kamala/harris border” “kamala/harris border czar” “kamala/harris voting record”
Honestly almost nothing autocompletes for either outside of age, nationality, net worth, height, news.
One of the few exceptions I found was “trump stormy daniels”
Assuming my results reflect what others get, on the whole Google actually seems pretty neutral here and is genuinely pursuing a policy of “never autocomplete anything related to either candidate but the bare minimum biographical details”
Oh yeah, I noticed that for 'Trump felony'. If so, well..
It suggests 'Trump felonies' when I start typing 'Trump felony'. Yandex doesn't suggest 'Trump felony' at all so I don't think even Google doesn't suggest 'trump felony' for you that it's intentional.
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Yeah I think you might have solved the mystery here.
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Highly likely. I got Arthur Calwell too, and that's a name I doubt many non-Australians would know (opposition leader back in the 1960s).
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I get only Truman.
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Show a screenshot, I get the exact same result as everyone but you apparently
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I put it in the same category as Google Gemini refusing to show white people. It's a hamfisted way of manipulating the prevalence and salience of a topic.
That query gives me Truman only: https://imgur.com/2ElIZQy
No hint that a person by the name of Donald Trump was ever the target of an assassination attempt. "Donald Trump Assassi" doesn't autocomplete either, and "Donald Trump shot" corrects my apparent typo to "...shoe".
To check, did it autocorrect in the "showing results for X, click here to get what you actually typed" sense (which I often get searching for weird shit)? When I did it, it came up with red underline on "shot" indicating a spelling error, and suggested "donald trump shoe", but pressing Enter did in fact take me to "donald trump shot" i.e. reports on the assassination attempt. I just want to check the exact details.
I think you got the same as me. An apparent typo on the autocomplete, that goes to the real results when entered: https://imgur.com/a/eNXCArL
Thanks for the clarification.
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