Google, which controls almost 90% of U.S. Internet search traffic, could sway an election by altering the search results it shows users.
New data indicate that may be happening, as conservative news sites including Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and the Federalist have seen their Google search listings dramatically reduced.
The data come from the search consultancy Sistrix, which tracks a million different Google search keywords and keeps track of how highly different sites rank across all the search terms.
The tracker shows that Google search visibility for Breitbart first plunged in 2017, before falling to approximately zero in July.
- For example, Googling the names of Breitbart's reporters sometimes forces users to click through page after page of less-relevant results before hitting a Breitbart link.
- In the case of Joel Pollak, the first Breitbart link appears on the bottom of page 7 of Google search results.
- In comparison, a search on the small Google competitor DuckDuckGo gives multiple links to Pollak’s Breitbart work on the first page.
Google did not respond to a request for comment about the data.
A public Google document from 2019 outlines how the company now employs humans to go through webpages and rate them based on "Expertise/Authoritativeness/Trustworthiness."
"Google has acknowledged they use human search quality raters who help evaluate search results," said Chris Rodgers, CEO and founder of Colorado SEO Pros.
Google claims they don't directly use such ratings to rank sites, but "based on those ratings Google will then tweak their algorithm and use machine learning to help dial in the desired results," Rodgers explained.
Google guidelines instruct raters to give the "lowest" ranking to any news-related "content that contradicts well-established expert consensus."
And how does one determine "expert consensus"?
Google guidelines repeatedly advise raters to consult Wikipedia, which it mentions 56 times: "See if there is a Wikipedia article or news article from a well-known news site. Wikipedia can be a good source of information about companies, organizations, and content creators."
The reliance on Wikipedia could partly explain the de-rankings, as the crowdsourced encyclopedia calls Breitbart "far right" and alleges that the Daily Caller "frequently published false stories." But Wikipedia's co-founder, Larry Sanger, recently wrote an essay about how "Wikipedia is badly biased."
In addition to the human ratings used to test algorithms, Google also has human-maintained blacklists.
A peer-reviewed study in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that a search engine could sway more than 10% of voters in an election simply by altering what results are shown.
“Such manipulations are difficult to detect, and most people are relatively powerless when trying to resist sources of influence they cannot see," the authors warned.
"When people are unaware they are being manipulated, they tend to believe they have adopted their new thinking voluntarily.”
The paper further says that Google's 87% market share is a concern.
While competitors are growing in popularity, their market share numbers remain low: Microsoft's Bing has 7.2% of the pie, and DuckDuckGo has 1.75%.
“Because the majority of people in most democracies use a search engine provided by just one company, election-related search rankings could pose a significant threat to the democratic system of government,” the paper concludes.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress in sworn testimony that his company only removes sites if they are deemed to be "interfering in elections" or conveying "violent extremism."
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/20/google_pushes_conservative_news_sites_far_down_search_lists_144246.html
