Google Search Results Have Liberal Bias, Study Finds (thedenverchannel.com)

According to a new study reported by The Wall Street Journal, Google's search results tend to lean liberal. "An analysis by online-search marketer CanIRank.com found that 50 recent searches for political terms on Google surfaced more liberal-leaning webpages than conservative ones, as rated by a panel of four people." The Denver Channel reports: "Minimum wage" tended to yield more liberal results, while "does gun control reduce crime" resulted in more conservative ones. Searches for "financial regulation" and "federal reserve" found mostly nonpartisan links. CanIRank used the opinions of four people to determine how liberal or conservative each website was. For 16 percent of the political search terms studied, no right-leaning results showed up at all on the first page of results. CanIRank noted this could be a problem for democracy. A different study found most people click on one of the first five search results. Users rarely move on to the second page. A Google spokesperson said in an email to the WSJ: "From the beginning, our approach to search has been to provide the most relevant answers and results to our users, and it would undermine people's trust in our results, and our company, if we were to change course." According to Google, their results are "determined by algorithms using hundreds of factors" and "reflect the content and information that is available on the internet."

Comments

Just try to find

[Hylandr]

I have read a lot of lines about 'the truth has a liberal bias', or 'liberal information tends to be science based', and I have to shake my head.

Try googling for any information on how to 'combat the rise of gender-fluidity', or 'how to explain physiology is a binary gender system', or 'how to explain gender fluidity is a social construct' and you get Nothing, Zip, Nada, that isn't in support of this brand of mental disorder.

Science based? Truth? Not even close. Everywhere you see sex that's outside a human social construct there's a male and female. Only humans social structure describes non-existent genders in liberal circles.

Not a troll, or flamebait, but I have asbestos underwear on, and I can already feel the flames from the mod-activism firing up.

Fact is, The science and truth hurt the liberal cause acutely no matter how much spin they try and put on it.

Re:Just try to find

[Capsaicin]

Firstly, you are WAY too obsessed with trannies. Your revulsion, lust, or repressed urge to be one is clouding your mind when it comes to understanding what is even being discussed in those links.

Everywhere you see sex that's outside a human social construct there's a male and female. Only humans social structure describes non-existent genders ...

As I've explained to you more than once I believe (will this be the time the penny finally drops?), the very purpose of the concept of 'gender' used in contradistinction to 'sex' is to distinguish biology from narrative.

'Sex' is a biological fact, and it falls into the classification of male, female, or occasionally intersex. 'Gender' on the other hand is a social construct by definition, usually described by the adjectives masculine, feminine and, given there is hardly any limit to our ability to craft narrative, all this contemporary gender fluid stuff (though even in traditional societies the idea of a 3rd gender for feminine (gender) males (biological sex)).

Gender used in this sense refers to that which is not biologically determined, but instead reflects the cultural ideas of how people of a given biological sex ought to behave. Eg. Bearing children is a function of female physiology, skirt wearing is not. A clue that skirt wearing behaviour is a matter of gender, and child-bearing is not, is to be found, as we have discussed, in the fact that in certain cultures skirts are items of masculine (gender) attire. This illustrates that the idea in our culture (with apologies to all you Scots out there) that skirts are for females (biological sex) and pants for males (biological sex) is a social construct. Thus a skirt (in our culture) is a feminine (gender) garment, not a female (biological sex) one.

It will thrill you, no doubt, to learn, that the most extreme (and thus easily ridiculed) branch of feminism, ie. RadFem (cf TERF), shares your disgust not only of gender (which they understand to exist, but wish to eliminate, see 'Gender critical' or GC) but also of male-to-female transsexuals, referring to them as male-to-transsexuals (or MTTs), that is when they are not too busy calling for fun stuff like the restriction of males (biological sex) to being 10% of the human population and the like ... Horseshoe effect?

What this does indicate though is that the very concept of gender (in contradistinction to sex) can be deployed to undermine the notion of gender-fluidity (i.e. as traditional gender roles break down what does this even mean anymore?) It is for this reason that the trans-gender lobby is seeking to infect the notion of gender with physiology by relying on the, imho rather dubious, concept of "brain-sex" as an explanation of why their gendered (feminine/masculine) self-image is at odds with their biological sex (male/female). Which amounts in effect to arguing that skirt-wearing behaviour is a function of physiology. That mainstream feminism (as opposed to RadFem) is so happy to accommodate the claim of trans-gendered males (biological sex) to being 'women' (biological sex or gender???) seems self-defeating to me. Were they not trying to escape the idea of sex as destiny (i.e. physiological femininity) But as a traditionally masculine (gender) male (biological sex) all I can say it's your movement girls.

And I'm WAY too obsessed with someone being obviously wrong on the internet.

Re: side effects of truthiness

[dilvish_the_damned]

And yet the people who assume that the study agrees with their world views are quick to accept it as some sort of reflection truth.

It is a well known fact reality is distorted.

Re:Reality has a liberal bias...

[alvinrod]

Funny that your last point is incorrect, demonstrating your own bias. We see the so-called invisible hand at work all the time, typically in black markets and people finding ways to end-around regulation. Supply exists to meet actual demand regardless of legality or whether its morally objectionable. Free markets tend to outperform state-controlled or centrally planned ones based on historical data. Note that this doesn't say anything about where the wealth ends up being concentrated.

For every thing the conservatives tend to believe that has no empirical basis (e.g. climate change is a hoax, creationism, etc.) there are just as many "unscientific" views held by liberals (e.g. gun-control policies, vaccines causing autism (both sides have some adherents to this, but it tends to be most prevalent among liberals), etc.) that are essentially faith-based or run contrary to established science. Try having a conversation about genetic components of intelligence with a liberal and you'll quickly find them rejecting that science as racist just as fast as a conservative will tell you that the global warming science is just as biased.

I've generally found that regardless of whatever a person believes they tend to overlook the cases that don't confirm their biases while focusing on those that do. I don't really blame them though as some scientists believe that these cognitive biases made our ancestors more fit from an evolutionary perspective. Perhaps humanity is slowly shifting away from this, but there isn't a lot of selective pressure against this trait. If anything it probably helps people find mates with a similar set of in-group biases as themselves while people who tend to be more objective just piss off everyone for some reason.

Re:Cold, heartless liberal bean counters

[AK Marc]

The data indicates that Blacks commit crimes less than whites, but that prison correlates with crime more than white does, so the racism of the system handing out more and longer sentences to Blacks shows statistics that have Blacks offending more. Correct for SES, and Blacks commit more crimes. Correct for recidivism and Blacks offend less.

Democrats don't want to destroy Appalachian culture. They just want to destroy the global damage caused by coal mining and burning. If the Appalachian culture was built around goats or sheep herding, the Democrats wouldn't have any issue with them.

Re:Bias in [current year]?

[Big Hairy Ian]

I suspect if you actually dug into Google's algorithms you'd discover that Google is probably not biased but that the internet almost certainly is

Re: Name ANY conservative and I'll show you

[david_thornley]

Since I have been able to vote (1972), Democratic Presidents have lowered the deficit, and Republicans (with the arguable exception of Nixon) have raised it.