Google bias

You’d think we’re living in a dystopian novel: news sites are blocked, politicians are prevented from reaching constituents, speech is arbitrarily labeled as “false,” and history is “forgotten.”  But this isn’t Orwell’s Airstrip One in 1984.  It’s America in 2020.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see this in action.  In late July, Breitbart and other websites that support the Trump administration mysteriously disappeared from Google's search results, leading some to believe that Google might maintain a “blacklist” of disfavored websites that it either buries or outright blocks from its search results.  We wanted to see if this was true, so we conducted a search for the terms “Azar” and “Taiwan” on both Google and DuckDuckGo, a Google competitor focused on user privacy.  For context, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar recently visited Taiwan.

The results were unsurprising, but still disappointing.  A Breitbart story detailing the event ranked ninth in the DuckDuckGo search.  On Google, the story didn’t even break the top 50.  Keep in mind, Breitbart consistently drives traffic to its website and user engagement on social media, and ranks higher in Amazon’s Alexa website rankings than either NBC News or The Wall Street Journal.

If Google were a small search engine, this sort of bias in its results might not matter.  But Google dominates online search.  Globally, across all platforms, Google enjoys a 92% market share.

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