US media dismisses Trump’s claims of Google manipulation

US presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaking at his rally in the critical Wisconsin county of Waukesha on Wednesday night, accused search giant Google of both impeding and bolstering his candidacy.

After saying that a new Google "poll" showed him leading Democratic nominee Clinton, he went on to accuse the market's most dominant search engine of working against him.

"A new post-debate poll, the Google poll, has us leading Hillary Clinton by two points nationwide," he said, "and that's despite the fact that Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton. How about that."

The media has been widely dismissive of Trump's claims, pointing out that Google itself did not run a poll after the debate.

Instead, the Independent Journal Review commissioned a poll using Google Consumer Surveys data. That poll showed Trump was leading Clinton nationally by 1.7 per cent, but that Clinton won the debate by 4 percentage points.

The Republican presidential nominee did not offer any examples of Google changing its search results in connection with Trump or Clinton.

Google declined to comment on Trump's statements.

The Washington Post's reporter is among those who says he wasn't exactly sure what Trump meant by "the Google poll". Google doesn't and hasn't polled over the course of the campaign. Nor, the reporter said, was he familiar with anything recent alleging that Google was "suppressing" anything.

As it turns out, this is classic Trump: Running full steam ahead with any sketchy evidence that seems like it might be helpful to him, The Washington Post says.

The "Google poll" appears to be a cumbersome reference to a Google Consumer Survey conducted by Independent Journal Review. The survey did show Trump with a 1.7-point lead. It also showed Clinton winning the debate by a 52-to-48 margin. (Independent Journal Review is a sort of right-leaning Buzzfeed.)

In June, a conspiracy theory spread around the Internet that Google was tamping down search results critical of Hillary Clinton. The idea was that searching for things like "hillary clinton cri" didn't automatically suggest "hillary clinton criminal" as an option - though "donald trump cri" would.

The report, a video from a site called SourceFed, was quickly rebutted by Google and debunked by other sites and people. Google said that its algorithms did filter out disparaging phrases after finding that it "too often predicted offensive, hurtful or inappropriate queries about people."