Earlier this year I had a question. And like billions of us, I looked to the search engine affectionately known as “Google” for the answer.
According to the latest data, there are more than 8.5 billion searches a day on Google, 99,000 in a single second. With the possible exceptions of Almighty God, mothers, and teachers, no entity raises more honest questions than this ubiquitous search engine. This helps explain why Google is the “most visited website in the world” — beating the runners-up YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
In the search engine competition, Google also dwarfs everyone else, with nearly 92% market share (compared to Bing at 3%, Yahoo! at 1.5%, and Yandex and Baidu around of 1% each). Its parent company, Alphabet, is estimated to be the third most valuable technology company in the world, behind IT giants Apple and Microsoft, but ahead of Amazon.
Much of this may be deserved. How many times have we been grateful to be able to quickly look up an answer to some random curiosity: “What is the most poisonous snake in South America? … is “bork” really a Scrabble word? … Who sang ‘You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you?’”
In these kinds of simple questions, the mighty Google excels. But its usefulness begins to waver a little on more complicated issues: a teenage girl’s lament: “Why are boys so stupid?” A seeker’s question: “Is God really real?” Or other important questions like “Why didn’t Weird Al win a Grammy for ‘Amish Paradise’?”
But there’s another set of questions that Google doesn’t seem to flinch at, and instead offers answers that are… well, kind of interesting.
On that fateful spring day, for example, I was curious to know how many New York police officers were injured in the protests following the death of George Floyd.
So I googled it. But I couldn’t find any direct answer on the first page of results. Or the second. Or the third page. Honestly, I was baffled that I couldn’t find an objective answer to a question that seemed quite important.
Instead, the search engine redirected my attention to something else Google thought it should be thinking about: how often the same New York police force was accused of assault during the same protests of summer
To be fair, more recent searches have been better, yielding a few examinations of the extent of police injuries, though most results still downplay them and point me elsewhere.
But I kept asking myself: Why didn’t this simple question have clear results as quickly as song lyrics or poisonous reptiles? Can we really trust Google with particularly sensitive socio-political or health-related questions?
The company’s bias towards its own interests has been known for years, leading to a $2.7 billion fine in 2017 from the European Union. And in 2018, then-President Donald Trump argued that “Google and others are suppressing the voices of conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can and cannot see.”
Those concerns increased in late 2019 after a Google engineer was fired claimed that Google executives said they would use their power “to control the flow of information to the public and make sure Trump loses in 2020.” Since then, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has testified before Congress, vigorously defending the company against these accusations.
Are the results skewed to the left?
So what is really true? In 2020, Nathan Gotch led an accurate analysis of 500 results in 50 “politically driven” terms and results calculated based on whether they were non-partisan, left-wing or right-wing. While 63% of Google’s search results were non-partisan, its results found “more left-wing websites appearing for key political topics,” with 32% of results coming from left-wing publications, in compared to 5% on the right. places.
While he attributed the tilt to better SEO strategy on the left, Gotch acknowledged that “it’s clear that right-wing websites have less visibility and coverage of key political issues.”
A separate analysis later that year by Patrick Stox also found that “liberal websites definitely get more (organic) traffic than conservative websites,” which he also attributed to more backlinks to progressive websites and the fact that conservatives are more suspicious of Google.
This mistrust has led to the creation of other search engines for people concerned about censorship. Todd Ricketts, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, recently launched a search engine called Freespoke after noticing that it “wasn’t getting the results I expected.”
I wanted to test this alternative, so I chose a series of pressing questions in American society today and compared the results side-by-side across the two search engines. When I Googled “abortion hurts women,” for example, a myth-busting article from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute led the way.
The same question in my Freespoke search produced results that directly addressed the question, including a response from a Roman Catholic site:
I found it remarkable that no anti-abortion commentary on this very Catholic question appeared until page five of the Google results. So I tried the same comparative search with socially charged questions, including: Should I help my teen make a gender transition? Are unarmed black men at greater risk of being shot by the police? Are white Christians really the greatest threat to American democracy? And will climate change really burn the planet?
What I found interesting about the results on the first page (where an estimate 92% of clicks come from) was that the Google results presented almost unanimous results that directed me to a single, monolithic answer. So parents wondering whether they should help their teen transition gender were gently nudged to ease their worries. People asking about white Christians and democracy were assured that white nationalists were an even bigger threat than they imagined. And people asking about climate change were warned, in no uncertain terms, that “climate disaster is here” and that there is no hope for “an uninhabitable Earth.”
While the Freespoke search engine also offered articles that reflected mainstream views, I noticed more diversity of viewpoints in the results, including articles like “Transitioning Teens Explain Why They Regret Changing Gender,” “The Number of unarmed black men shot and killed by police” and, from Deseret, “White Christian Nationalism: A Threat to Democracy?Even with climate change, there were some articles that explored the debate more broadly: “Is climate change an ‘existential threat’? Is global warming just a natural cycle?
The wrong question?
While it’s natural to want a search engine to provide the correct answer on established questions of fact, we should want them to present diversity of thought when there is still significant debate.
However, in almost every socially and politically sensitive question I’ve asked Google, the vast majority of the initial answers preached to me about the popular, orthodox position, that is, the one that reflects a politically liberal conclusion.
I also find it funny that many of the Google results lead me away from the question I asked and towards an answer to a question I apparently should have asked. (For example, my search results for the abortion question implied that I should have asked instead, “How does lack of access to abortion hurt women?”)
The orthodoxy of search results has been especially pronounced in health-related queries lately, especially since the pandemic. I have almost given up on search engines for this task, as most questions I pose about a particular treatment or health condition yield only one answer. Similar to censorship on social networks, health-related searches appear to be even more biased than political searches. My results line up with Gotch’s, which said“I stopped using Google search entirely last year when I had to look through 8-10 pages of results to find clinically relevant data whose results didn’t align with the COVID narrative at the time “.
So what does all this mean? I reached out to one of my colleagues, who has studied knowledge dissemination for many years and has published research on Google Scholar, to see what he thought. Reflecting on trends in universities, media and tech companies, he said simply: “Now the left controls information.”
I should note that this was before Elon Musk bought Twitter.
To be fair, there are many factors that influence search results, including search engine optimization experts who help us all try to game the system and rank higher in search results.
And the influence of the industry is also clear. For example, health-related results on the first page that do not come from official organizations often have some connection to pharmaceutical companies, such as WebMD, which has associates with Eli Lilly. Go ahead and look up anything health related, and you’ll see what I mean.
All of this makes it nice to have alternative search engines. But do they have much chance of breaking into the market? Hey, it’s worth a try. But if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on a more plausible option: we’re all starting to realize that we need to think for ourselves and not rely on Google to think for us, especially when it comes to bigger questions of all
In this case, a home call to mom or a prayer for higher wisdom is still our best option.
Jacob Hess is the editor of Public Square Magazine and served on the board of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. He has worked to promote liberal-conservative understanding since publishing “You’re Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You’re Still Wrong)” with Phil Neisser. With Carrie Skarda, Kyle Anderson and Ty Mansfield, Hess also wrote “The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints.”
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