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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.
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?
There's not even objective evidence of what is being claimed. This is just the opinion of four people.
This.
"...CanIRank used the opinions of four people..."
What the simple fuck?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
a fact bias? Because that could explain things. . .
Note: Moderators that modded this down had a small penis bias.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
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.
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.
Most conservative "facts" when it comes to gun control are still based on the long-ago debunked statistical model of John Lott Jr. If the claims of conservative websites were true, countries like Japan wouldn't have a murder rate per capita that is less than 1/10th of the US nor would countries like Somalia with no gun control would have one that is nearly double that of the US.
Except for the fact that gun violence is more about a poor educational system and few to low quality job opportunities, and not so much about civilian access to firearms. Switzerland has a vibrant sport shooting community but they also have a good educational system, a good social safety net, etc. Plus firearms owners have had safety training and practice safe storage. What is going right in Japan and going wrong in Somalia has little to do with gun violence. Gun violence is a symptom of other problems. But to acknowledge this with respect to US gun violence would mean accepting decades of mistaken US policy and liberal politicians would rather not do that.
I guess the takeaway is that the Wall Street Journal is a fake news site.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There's not even objective evidence of what is being claimed. This is just the opinion of four people.
What you don't realize is that some belief systems that have been popular for thousands of years only need a crusty old book with no contemporary evidence to basically enslave all of the Western Europe for several centuries. We've come far as a culture but still very far from rational, it pains me to say. I think we'll eventually get there though.
We'll make great pets
I think that many people on the right behave the same way, just about different topics.
And it's annoying no matter who is doing it.
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:
Your describing what conservatives *should* be, not what they are.
In reality, their "cold hard facts" are often aren't facts at all, but are instead per-conceived postulates. Thus, so much emphasis on "faith" and "principles", objective evidence be damned.
They are also usually focused less how things *are*, than on how they think things *were*, as interpreted through some distorted rose-colored filter.
I have observed that liberals tend to be idealists, conservatives realists.
That's right. That's why the Earth is 6,000 years old, climate change doesn't exist no matter what the science says, evolution is a myth, market forces are the answer to any problem, implementing a minimum wage totally ruined our economy, we are safer if we all have guns despite the statistics from other countries, the government should not try to control our lives and yet somehow gay marriage not only devalues our normal marriages and causes earthquakes.