Recent Research into Google Search Bias

Papers Measuring Google Intentional Bias

Artificial bias has been found intentionally introduced by Google team in addition to the natural bias caused by the media dominance of the Left and influence of websites from foreign political entities.

Leo Goldstein, Google’s search bias against conservative news sites has been quantified (Sep 2017) – my latest paper. The full title is A Method of Google Search Bias Quantification and Its Applications in Climate Debate and General Political Discourse.

Leo Goldstein, Caught Red-Handed: Google Search Suppresses Climate Realism (Jul 2017) – Shows intentional bias in the climate debate using publicly available Google Search Quality Evaluation General Guidelines

Matt Bentley / CanIRank.com, Google bias in search results; 40% lean left or liberal (Nov 2016) – Uses a rigorous methodology, different from mine, and arrives to the conclusions in the title, and other interesting results. Covered in many online publications, including Newsmax, WSJ, Powerline Blog.

Papers Measuring Google Bias from All Causes

Robert Epstein et al, A Method for Detecting Bias in Search Rankings, with Evidence of Systematic Bias Related to the 2016 Presidential Election – This study concludes that Google Search bias had shifted up to 3 million votes to Hillary. Covered broadly, including in Breitbart and even Washington Post (“Google dismissed Epstein’s research as ‘nothing more than a poorly constructed conspiracy theory.’”)

Slate, Why Google Search Results Favor Democrats (Dec 2015) – This article reports a study, performed in collaboration with the New America, a Google funded and Google’s Eric Schmidt chaired “no think tank,” which recently fired an employee for criticizing Google. The subtitle “It’s not because the company is biased—it’s more complicated” is a plausible, but incorrect explanation. In the light of my papers, Matt Bentley study, and the growing body of the anecdotal evidence, the explanation should be It is complicated, but Google is very biased.