[thornton]

Google is doing this because political content is harder to fact check and they do have initiatives to fight misinformation online. Autocomplete/suggest results are an aggregation of related searches so people could search something false and it shows on autocomplete making a user think a statement is true. Essentially autocomplete can be hijacked generally. Also auto suggest was originally an effort to reduce the number of unique searches which are generally quite high, something like 30%! By funneling people to certain results pages they could increase bids on ads for those results and have an easier time with QC by not having to account for as many completely unique searches. By leaving autocomplete off they actually generate more search intent data around those types of queries which they can do whatever they want with. I’m sure Google can predict a close election better with auto suggest off on political search intent. While I don’t love anything G does, I do think in this case it is a good practice to turn off autocomplete for certain types of news results. If Bing and DDG are showing autocomplete I hope it’s being monitored or those suggestions.