But it’s also happening to midterm candidates in an outrageous fashion.
MRC Free Speech America has analyzed Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo search results for the 12 Senate races identified by RealClearPolitics as the most important to watch. Our researchers caught Google burying 10 of 12 Senate Republican Party candidates’ campaign websites while highlighting their opponents campaign sites in organic search results. This stands in stark contrast to Bing and DuckDuckGo whose search results treated Republican and Democrat campaign websites more neutrally than Google.
I should point out, as usual, that Duck Duck Go is just Bing with anonymous results.
But there’s absolutely no reason why a political candidate’s website shouldn’t be in the top results.
Google completely hid seven of 12 Senate Republican Party candidates’ campaign websites in page one organic search results. Seven of 12 Senate Republican Party candidates’ campaign websites did not appear on page one using Google’s organic search. Meanwhile, eight of 12 Senate Democratic Party candidate campaign websites were highlighted in the top six items in organic search results.
One of the examples here is “Blake Masters Senate Race 2022” in which his site appears below CNBC and New York Times stories about him. “Mark Kelly Senate Race 2022” has nothing except FiveThirtyEight polls ahead of his site.
Basic search results ethics are that the actual site for the thing being searched should be at the top of the results. Google routinely chooses to ignore that, but Newsbusters has evidence that there’s differing treatment in this regard which is not at all surprising. Google is however denying it.
“While we cannot respond to specific claims without seeing the research, there is no validity whatsoever to allegations of political bias on Google Search. As third parties have found, political ideology is not a factor in our search ranking systems. We don’t and would never manipulate search results, modify our products or enforce our policies in any way to promote or disadvantage any particular political ideology, viewpoint or candidate,” a Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
I can state based on my actual experience that this is not true.
