Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Google has sometimes gotten in trouble for the phrases that automatically appear when you’re trying to type in a new search. Even if some of them make for amusing celebrity interviews, others have sometimes steered users toward problematic concepts and fake news in addition to harmless movie and video game spoilers. The suggestions are based on what other people are searching for, after all.
But in the buildup to the 2020 US presidential election, Google is changing its autocomplete policies to theoretically weed out one particular category of suggestion: “Election related predictions” that could be interpreted as favoring a particular candidate or political party.
The new policy is extremely short, so I’ll just give you the whole thing…