Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson were both left off a Google search for presidential candidates.
For some time, when one would search “presidential candidates,” results for Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as well as Green Party nominee Jill Stein would show up. Trump and Johnson were left off.
Google responded, saying it was due to a “technical bug” in the Knowledge Graph, which is a large information-mapping system that gives the top results under many fact-based searches.
“Only the presidential candidates participating in an active primary election were appearing in a Knowledge Graph result,” a Google spokesperson told The Verge.
“Because the Republican and Libertarian primaries have ended, those candidates did not appear. This bug was resolved early this morning.”
A screenshot of the Google search result for “presidential candidates” as of Friday morning. (Screenshot/Google.com)Google has been panned for alleged manipulation during the political cycle. Last month, a video from the Sourcefeed YouTube channel claimed Google hid autocorrect suggestions for Clinton. Google denied the allegations, saying, “Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause. Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how Autocomplete works.”
Facebook and Twitter have also faced allegations of censorship. Twitter was accused of censoring a trending hashtag related to the WikiLeaks dump of nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Facebook also garnered criticism after blocking links to the WikiLeaks website.
