Most people assume Google knows the answers to everything, and think the top search results for what they’re looking for is the correct answer. Studies have shown that over 90% of the time people click on what is served up on page one and rarely even look at page two or beyond.503 The ranking of search results gives Google an enormous amount of power since each page shows just ten different results out of hundreds of thousands, or millions of possible webpages. They can easily prevent people from finding articles or websites by just dropping them down to page two or three in the results.
Google’s ability to surface certain information they want to promote while suppressing what they don’t like by manipulating their algorithm gives them enormous power to artificially boost certain companies, products, or political candidates and causes over others.
Speaking of the 2016 election, one Google engineer wrote in internal emails, “This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it.”504 They then suggested manipulating the search results to bury articles from Breitbart and the Daily Caller, saying, “How many times did you see the Election now card with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed.”505
“I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources—because not doing so hides real information under loud noises… Beyond that, let’s concentrate on teaching critical thinking. A little bit of that would go a long way. Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years—demographics will be on our side.”506
Google insiders also discussed manipulating the search results to counter President Trump’s proposed “Travel Ban” in January 2017 which would have prevented people living in countries with high rates of terrorist activity from entering the United States for a period of time. The Wall Street Journal reported, “Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function to Counter Travel Ban,”507 and detailed, “Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways they might be able to tweak the company’s search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails.”508
Those emails showed that, “employees proposed ways to ‘leverage’ search functions and take steps to counter what they considered to be ‘Islamophobia.’”509 After they were leaked, Google issued a statement denying that they had actually done it, and said the plan was just a “brainstorm of ideas.”510
A Google employee who has been leaking information to Breitbart told them, “I know there are efforts to demote anything non-PC, anti-Communist and anti-Islamic terror from search results. To what extent that has been successful, I don’t know.”511 PJ Media did an examination of the search results for the word “Trump” in the Google News tab and calculated that 96% of the results were from liberal media outlets.512 Similar informal tests have been done by searching for various other topics, such as when Fox News founder Roger Ailes died people noticed that most search results painted him as a monster, with articles from Rolling Stone declaring he was “one of the worst Americans ever” surfacing at the top, along with others like one from NBC News claiming he “built a kingdom on exploited bias,” and the London Guardian saying he helped “create this nightmare world.”513 A study at Northwestern University’s Computational Journalism Lab also found that the majority of search results on Google News were from left-leaning outlets.514
If you search for the same key words on Google and Bing, or Duck Duck Go, you’ll often notice dramatically different results. On numerous occasions when doing research for this book I have Googled various topics trying to find articles that I had seen in the past so I could use them as the citations and had a difficult time finding many of them on Google, but when I looked on other search engines they were in the top results. Sometimes when I was even searching for an article’s exact title after having copied and pasted it into my notes when I first saw it posted on social media, it wouldn’t show up on the first page of search results on Google.
Google even rolled out a new “fact check” widget as part of their supposed fight against “fake news” but after a report from the Daily Caller showed the feature was targeting mostly conservative news sites in attempts to paint their overall reporting as inaccurate or misleading, (while ignoring false stories published by BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, Vox, Salon, and others) Google shut down the feature saying they “encountered challenges” and admitted they were “unable to deliver the quality” they hoped to provide their users.515
Google deleted Dr. Patrick Moore from the list of Greenpeace founders after he made headlines for insulting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over her ridiculous Green New Deal and praised President Trump.516 Google often displays what are called “knowledge panels” as the top search results for certain topics, which are small boxes highlighting a few main points about the subject. And prior to his headline-making comments about the moronic Congresswoman, Dr. Patrick Moore was included in the knowledge panel when someone searched for “Greenpeace founders,” but immediately after insulting her royal highness, Google mysteriously scrubbed him from it.517
The knowledge panel for the popular pro-life movie Unplanned (2019) listed the genre as “propaganda” when it first came out, instead of “drama,” “action,” or “science fiction” like all other movies are labeled. As usual, after word went viral on social media of this “mistake” Google fixed it.518
A group at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology concluded a study in April 2018 after looking into how much Google’s search results could influence undecided voters by surfacing negative or positive results about certain issues and candidates and reported that such manipulation could shift the preference of those voters between 20 and 80 percent.519 The same research team led by search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein concluded that during the 2018 midterm election, Google had been able to flip three key congressional seats from Republican to Democrat due to the prevalence of pro-Democrat bias in the search results.520
A former Google employee who worked as a “design ethicist” where he studied the ethics of using technology to persuade people, later warned in a TED talk, “A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.”521
Even Google News has recently changed to prevent people from finding exactly what they are looking for. The “News” tab is used to retrieve only search results from mainstream and brand name news sources, not just any random website like the main Google search page. You used to be able to select specific topics you’re interested in and Google News would show recent stories about those topics all on one page, but in 2017 they changed the layout making it much more difficult to customize your Google News feed, and now you have to click on each individual topic you’re interested in, making it tedious and cumbersome, thus encouraging users to rely on the Google News home page which contains stories curated by their editors instead of creating a custom feed to see only the topics you want to read about.
Then in March 2018 Google announced their “News Initiative” plan promising to give $300 million dollars to various “news” organizations over the next three years, as well as offer them various tools and services in order to help them expand their online presence.522 They have so much money they’re just giving it away, probably to garbage websites like Vox, the Daily Beast, and HuffPost.