Search enginesSearch Results Not Biased Along Party Lines: Study

In recent months, questions have arisen about big tech’s unparalleled influence over what news and information people see online. Potential political bias and censorship in search engine results are a big part of the conversation. Is the concern well-founded?

According to newly published research by Stanford scholars, there appears to be no political favoritism for or against either major political party in the algorithm of a popular search engine.

Stanford scholars reviewed the first page of Google search results for every candidate running for federal office in the 2018 U.S. election over a six-month period. After a systematic audit of about 4 million URLs scraped from the search engine, they found that sources from either end of the political spectrum are not being excluded from results. For the most part, the researchers found that the news sources most commonly held a relatively centrist point of view.

“Our data suggest that Google’s search algorithm is not biased along political lines, but instead emphasizes authoritative sources,” said Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and author on the study that recently published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Human-Computer Interaction. “I think audits of large-scale algorithms that play such an important role in so many aspects of our lives are crucial. We need to be able to trust that these AI systems aren’t biased in important ways, and without audits, it’s difficult to assess these opaque algorithms.”

Evaluating Search Media
Internet search plays a key role in today’s political process. “Recent studies have shown that web users are more likely to find and trust news through search than social media,” said Danaë Metaxa, a doctoral candidate in computer science and first author on the study. “We’ve also heard concern from many sources including the White House that search may be biased (for example against conservative media), a claim that our audit methodology is well-suited to investigate systematically and thoroughly.”

Stanford says that in their audit, the researchers focused on news sources that appeared on the first page of a Google search query for every candidate running for federal office in the 2018 election. This included over 3,000 candidates running for 225 seats in the U.S House of Representatives and the Senate. Of these, 878 candidates were on the ballot in the general election.