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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."
It is a well known fact that reality has a strong liberal bias.
Well, as they say, truth has a liberal bias, so if your search engine weights things that provide more credible factual information, and more credible factual information is associated with liberal news/information sources, what's the problem?
If the effect however, is that conservative opinions / viewpoints based on factual information are being deemphasized, then that's a valid point - but I don't think that's the effect going on here. Or perhaps conservative viewpoint webpages tend not to contain the same amount of credible factual information...
Intelligence has a liberal bias.
Google is a smart search engine built by smart people.
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.
Four people rated the results? That sounds like pretty flimsy evidence. Why are their opinions some definitive source of truth?
As the summary indicates the bias varies with the topic. Having a conservative bias on gun control suggests the engine is getting things correct. In this case the conservative side is more fact based and less appealing to emotion and placebo "solutions". So yeah, maybe the search engine page ranking is working fine.
a fact bias? Because that could explain things. . .
Note: Moderators that modded this down had a small penis bias.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
The summary in fact offers an example where conservative websites are emphasized and it happens to be on a topic where the conservatives usually have the facts on their side. Gun control. Like it or not the facts from an engineering and historical point of view favor the conservatives. The liberal side of the argument seems mostly emotion and embracing placebo "solutions".
Google's results are not the same for every searcher in every locale. They are dependent on what you've searched for in the past, where you're at, what is in the news at the moment, etc.
In other words, they are quite intentionally biased to meet the likely desires of the user. This article has no basis in science, though it cloaks itself in that fashion to those who know nothing about science, and is far more biased than Google's search results.
I have observed that liberals tend to be idealists, conservatives realists. The song Imagine by John Lennon is a beautiful expression of liberal thinking.
Liberals speak of what they desire *could* be, and very often of how things *should* be. Conservatives focus much more on the cold, hard facts of how things *are*. So much so that it often makes discussions difficult:
Conservative: That doesn't work, X% of y are Z.
Liberal: No! X shouldn't be Z!
Conservative: "Should" doesn't matter, X -are- Z.
Liberal: You racist fuck, you think X should be Z!? That makes you a bigot!
I will explain you why. Most right wing party are what we call "conservative". Which means a tendency to not change the status quo, to ark back to position which static , "what was done before is good enough" etc... It is only a tendency so look at the average. By nature conservative stay on the habitual position we had. The problem is, science and the new technology we have had for the last 100 years and especially 20-30 years are disruptive. New knowledge is disruptive of the habits of the old one. For example science discovered that spanking is contra productive. Science pointed out at global warning. The problem is that that "new" fact , is disruptive of "old" fact. So they go AGAINST the current for conservative. That is why even it is said in jest, science and new stuff , as disruptive of old stuff as they are, have an anti-conservative bias by nature. New discovery by necessity disrupt old habits/old knowledge, and so by definition will be anti conservative. Some people say "liberal" bias but I would say "disruptive" as politically neutral, as some of the cow of "liberals" (I hate those term) are also slaughtered by disruptive new findings.
So yes, even if said in jest, there is a base of truth in it.
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Then respect the conservatives' that the budget won't cover all that, but we CAN afford to do A, B, and C.
Baloney. The conservatives NEVER argue to cut the things that actually matter from the budget. They just borrow the money instead of raising taxes but are just as irresponsible. Conservatives NEVER bring up cutting social security, medicare/medicaid, or the defense budget which together account for about 3/4 of the federal budget. Any politician that claims to be about fiscal responsibility who doesn't talk about how they are going to cut the defense budget or medicare is lying through their teeth about what the budget will cover. They are unwilling to make the hard choices and cut the programs that matter.
You could cut every cent of every program except for medicare, medicaid, defense and social security and you STILL couldn't balance the budget. So anyone who talks about "cutting pork" without discussing those four programs is full of shit about being fiscally responsible.