Google liberal bias: studies show a 40% lean toward left/liberal results

“Although internet search engines like Google play an increasingly prominent role shaping voter opinions and perception of issues and candidates, their ranking algorithms aren’t designed to provide a fairly balanced or completely honest representation of controversial issues.

In order to assess how fairly search engine results portray political candidates and controversial issues, over 1,200 URLs were collected ranking highly in Google.com for politically-charged keywords such as “gun control”, “abortion”, “TPP”, and “Black Lives Matter”. Each URL was then assessed for political slant by politically active individuals from both the left and right.

Among the key findings were that top search results were almost 40% more likely to contain pages with a “Left” or “Far Left” slant than they were pages from the right. Moreover, 16% of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results.

Our analysis of the algorithmic metrics underpinning those rankings suggests that factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.”

Do you think such a widely used search engine should hold biases, and do you think it could possibly be harmful when researching scholarly or statistical topics? How do you feel about this? Do you use Google or do you prefer a different search engine?