Allana Akhtar

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – Google defended itself against charges of political bias in its search algorithm after a video alleged it distorted display results for Hillary Clinton.

Creators of the video on the YouTube channel SourceFed, which had accumulated over 15 million views on Facebook and nearly 300,000 on YouTube by Friday evening, alleged Google’s search engine Autocomplete feature suppresses searches pairing the presumptive Democratic nominee with criminal activity.

If someone types “Hillary Clinton cri,” Google’s search suggests phrases like “Hillary Clinton crime reform” and “Hillary Clinton crisis”, said Matt Lieberman, host and writer for SourceFed, in the video. Yet after typing the same phrase on Yahoo or Bing search, suggestions on crimes and criminal activity are among the first suggestions, he notes. SourceFed said the autofill on Google occurs despite the fact “hillary clinton crimes” is a far more popular search phrase than “Hillary Clinton crime reform.”

“The intention is clear: Google is burying potential searches for terms that could have hurt Hillary Clinton in the primary elections over the past several months,” Lieberman said in the video.

Google's response: That view misunderstands how the autocomplete feature works.

A Google executive, writing in a blog post Friday after "questions about our autocomplete feature" in the past week, said the autocomplete algorithm purposefully avoids suggesting offensive words in conjunction with any person's name.

"The autocomplete algorithm is designed to avoid completing a search for a person’s name with terms that are offensive or disparaging," wrote Tamar Yehoshua, vice president of product management for Google's search, in the post. "We made this change a while ago following feedback that Autocomplete too often predicted offensive, hurtful or inappropriate queries about people. This filter operates according to the same rules no matter who the person is," Yehoshua said.

Republican candidate Donald Trump responded to the video’s allegations, saying it is a “disgrace” if Google would manipulate its searches.

“Very, very dishonest,” Trump said in a statement to USA Today. “They should let it float and allow people to see how crooked she really is.”

Matt Cutts, former head of the web spam team at Google, who is on leave, said SourceFed’s allegation of Google actively altering searches to favor Hillary Clinton are “simply false.”

Cutts tweeted that more often, people who are searching negatives about the candidate use only her first name instead of “Hillary Clinton.” He displayed a series of live screenshots to prove his point, such as one displaying “hillary in” being autofilled with “Hillary indictment” or “Hillary indictment news.”

“Why make a long video of these claims without doing deeper research? It’s just not true” Cutts tweeted to the creator of the SourceFed video.

This is the second time this week Google’s search algorithm has been criticized for its results. A video on Twitter showed a search of “three black teenagers” on Google resulted in pictures of police mugshots, yet a search for “three white teenagers” displayed groups of smiling young people. The Twitter post had been retweeted over 68,000 times in three days and sparked the hashtag #threeblackteenagers” as users expressed frustration over the discrepancy.

Google responded to the criticism by saying the search engine reflects biases which already exist in society, and that search results reflect the frequency with which particular images appear and ways they are described.

Fellow tech powerhouse Facebook has also found itself muddled in accusations of political bias after a former news curator for Facebook’s “Trending Topics” feature told technology blog Gizmodo that the curator's colleagues would not display conservative topics and stories from conservative news outlets to users.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with prominent conservative media leaders in May and the service said it has made some changes to the Trending Topics selection process.