Here’s a fun experiment you can try out yourself . . .
Pull up a Google search bar and type “does joe biden have dementia.” Of course you know Google has an autocomplete feature to fill in common searches. Here’s what happened when I started to type “does joe biden have dementia”:
According to Google, the top search starting with “does joe biden have” is “does joe biden have a dog”! Are people making decisions about presidential candidates based on whether or not they have a dog?!
Here’s the result when I type in the whole search phrase:
There’s no autocomplete at all! Apparently I’m the only person in the entire universe to enter the search phrase “does joe biden have dementia.”
Now switch search engines. I switched to DuckDuckGo and started typing the same search phrase. Here’s the result:
With DuckDuckGo, I only have to type three letters to get an autocomplete for “does joe biden have dementia”!
I’m not even sure what the right word is for what Google is doing here. “Dishonest” is not strong enough and I don’t think “sinister” is either. Maybe “corrupt” or “malignant.”
They buried that search. And there doesn’t seem to be anyone in the organization who cares or feels safe in saying “That is some bullshit right there and regardless of political persuasion, I’m not going to be part of it.”
Thus spoke The Programmer.