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Google appears to favor liberal sites in its searches

Link here.

The author tries to quantify the suspected bias of Google against conservative and climate-skeptic websites, and is successful in showing that these sites definitely show up much less in Google search results. In some cases he labels the search results so low he calls it blacklisting.

The results show that Google Search is heavily biased against conservative domains, and some respectable conservative domains seem to be blacklisted: thegatewaypundit.com, pjmedia.com, americanthinker.com, redstate.com, powerlineblog.com, drudgereport.com

The numbers for Drudge are especially damning, as they come up in Google searches less than any other site measured, despite having routinely more traffic than anyone, conservative or liberal.

It is still possible that the differences here are just a reflection of society, and that conservative sites simple get less traffic, but I increasingly do not believe this and this paper adds weight to the growing conclusion by many that Google has its thumb on the scale.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
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"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • wayne

    “I am shocked…
    https://youtu.be/nM_A4Skusro
    (048)

    Referencing Drudge;
    He absolutely does have huge page-views (like’ 900 million/month) and his monthly unique-visits run around 19 million/month.
    https://www.quantcast.com/p-e2qh6t-Out2Ug

    Not apologizing for google, but Drudge is a link-farm.
    – I only play a search-engine-optimizer-expert, on the Interweb, but one thing about google’s search algorithm(s)– they give weight to both “linked-to” and “linked-from” traffic.
    Drudge links to 100’s of items daily, but there are far less reciprocal links leading back to Drudge.
    That being said–

    I am fairly certain google manipulates everything they do. (and although I have a heavy libertarian bent, it’s a monopoly run by Progressive Statists.)

  • Garry

    I have no doubt that Google results are biased, but I’m not sure this is the best metric for evaluating it.

    As I understand it, the metric divides visits via Google referrals by total visits.

    As one example, I typically take short breaks from my intense editing work, about every hour or so. At this time I do a quick check of my favorite sites, including Behind the Black, Watts Up With That, and Drudge. On a typical day, I generate perhaps 10 hits on each site, none of them via Google referrals. So I ad 0 to the numerator and about 10 to the denominator.

    I would guess that most people who visit Behind the Black either have it bookmarked, or type it in directly after hearing Mr. Z on the John Batchelor Show. All of these visits register as hits, but not as Google-referred hits.

    Drudge gets so many hits per day that it would need probably millions of Google referrals to hit the “normal” rate of 30% by Google referral. A better comparison for Drudge would be MSNBC, Yahoo, or some other news site, which I suspect get most of their visitors in a similar way as Drudge (plus via the advantage of being the default homepage in some instances, such as when getting free wifi in a hotel room or when installing certain search engines).

    I think many people have their favorite sites, and visit often without doing a Google search. Many of us visit sites very often, skewing the metric used in this article.

    Where Google makes a difference is when people are looking for info on, say, global warming. There must be a better metric for measuring referrals to different sites for particular keywords; that metric may very well show Google to be more biased than shown by the metric used in this paper.

  • Chris

    Use DuckDuckGo or many others.
    Quit using the phase “go Google that”. Use “Web-Search” instead.
    These guys -Google – want us to think differently and they are directing us and tracking us. Move away from them.

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