Just now I went to look for some information on Haley Barbour (one of my early 2012 favorites) on Google and this happened:

Now, I have less understanding of how Google works than I do of most voodoo rituals (and I have a sneaking suspicion that they both involve chanting in languages humans don’t speak and the blood of chickens). Some people are going to assume that Google has been monkeying with the autocomplete results and they have certainly admitted that they are capable of doing it and are in fact doing it right now in certain contexts. So, that is one possibility. The other possibility is that “racist” is legitimately the number one associated term with “Haley Barbour” when it comes to Google searches.

Either way, this would seem to present a problem for a guy who is probably going to have to face it down squarely anyway. As a driver of information, Google is no longer an entity capable of being dismissed as I would gather that it is more significant now than the print versions of several of the largest newspapers in America combined. And when people go to learn for the first time about Haley Barbour in the internet, Google is apparently going to tell them that one of the most significant things to learn about Barbour is, apparently, “racist.”