A key Google feature is not showing results related to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, as the former president's son claims big tech companies are trying to influence the election.
This also sparked a Senate investigation.
Google users were surprised to find that the search engine's “autocomplete” was apparently omitting search results related to the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump.
The anomaly quickly caught the attention of social media users, including Texas congressmen and Donald Trump Jr., who began sharing screenshots of instances where Google's search suggestions returned no results for searches related to the Pennsylvania rally shooting.
Even if you type the full search term “assassination attempt” into the search bar on the Google homepage, no mention of Trump is made.
The Washington Post ran a number of Google searches for the surnames of US presidents who have been assassinated or have suffered assassination attempts, plus the letter “assassi,” to see what autocomplete would suggest, including John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Teddy Roosevelt.
In each case, they were presented with a helpful list of suggested search terms related to the attempt on their life.
But when Trump's name was used, Autocomplete offered no suggestions at all.
The keyword “Trump assassination attempt” also resulted in no additional terms being surfaced by Google.
News articles about the July 13 shooting still appear in Google search results.
A Google spokesperson told The Washington Post that “no manual action was taken in response to these predictions” and that the company's systems have “protections” built into them against autocomplete predictions “related to political violence.”
Here is the latest on the assassination attempt against Donald Trump:
“We are working on improvements to make our systems more up to date. Of course, autocomplete is just a tool to save people time and users can continue to search for anything. After this egregious act, people have turned to Google to find quality information. We connect people with useful results and will continue to do so,” the spokesperson said.
As word spread about the strange phenomenon, it caught the attention of thousands of users who were able to replicate it for themselves, including Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, who wrote “VERIFIABLE” along with a screenshot of the search he tried.
Trump Jr. also shared an X post with a screenshot of autocomplete search results, calling it “intentional election interference” by the search giant.
“Big tech is once again trying to interfere in our election to help Kamala Harris. We all know this is deliberate election interference by Google. This is so vile,” he wrote to his 11.7 million followers.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) expressed outrage over the omission on social media and said he would launch a “formal investigation” into the Mountain View, California, company later this week.
“Why is Google throttling searches related to the Trump assassination attempt? These are all screenshots from this morning. Has there been a dramatic increase in Truman biographers in the last 2 weeks?” he asked, referring to an example of a search he included in his post that returned results about Harry Truman but not Trump.
“We look forward to their response,” the senators wrote.
It should be noted that The Washington Post also ran partial and full searches for “Biden assassination attempt,” which again showed no autocorrect suggestions.
In what is not widely considered an assassination attempt, alleged neo-Nazi Sai Varshit Kandura rammed a rented U-Haul truck into the White House security barrier in May 2023, saying his goal was to “kill the president if that's what I have to do.”
