Ask HN: Do Google search results have a political bias?

[trahn]

Just noticed when googling "reitschuster volksverpetzer", the former being a German political commentator on the right, the latter on the left, search results are dominated by the left-wing site even though the site is around 5 times smaller. Any ideas, perspectives, experiences, knowledge about it?

[TonyBagODonuts]

I was shown the google image results for "happy white woman" vs "happy black woman" and the difference in results are stark. I do believe there's an agenda now, if it's internal to google or seo manipulation I don't know, but it's there.

[kypro]

I've seen people bring this up before and to play devils advocate here I've wondered before if this is more because white people/couples are seen as the default.

For example have you ever noticed how when a white guy achieves something it's reported like, "Physicist John Smith wins nobel prize", but were it a black guy it would be reported as, "Black Physicist John Smith wins nobel prize"? And beyond the title the content of the second article will often be how white guys are over represented and that this is a sign of progress.

So perhaps this is what we should expect to see given any article which discusses white women as a group is probably in relation to some racial issue faced by black women.

[aborsy]

Interesting. I can’t help but notice something is at play!

[giardini]

Quite a striking difference! The first page of "happy black woman" shows black women being happy, mostly alone but "happy white woman" shows white women with men at least half the time and about half of those are men of color!

I tried a few variations and can only conclude that Google has become a piece of shite as far as search is concerned. I hear it's still OK for translation but, if the current situation continues, they'll soon be mistranslating to some unknown purpose.

[muzani]

Ironically, this is the top result: https://theconversation.com/googles-algorithms-discriminate-...

[p0d]

I think we see a more liberal agenda playing out through big tech as it supports their ethos. That is, jobs/marketing aimed at the current obsession with diversity and support for immigration. I get immigration as the world is global and we need a global workforce.The latter I find weird. I turned 50 this week and have observed society to have become more angry and frightened over the last 30 years. It does not surprise me then that Google's tech follows and creates bias. Ironic.

[ruiidont]

Of course. Google for sure. Though I have not seen any bias on Duckduckgo.

[trahn]

You're speaking from own experiences, I guess?

[phillipseamore]

They are likely treating 'volksverpetzer' as a "site:" modifier. E.g. it's common for users to search for "topic site" (like "alligator drone bbc").

[trahn]

Just tried googling it the other way around (if you meant that?) and it’s the same story. Both of the terms could be understood as „site:“ modifier, as the respective websites are term + .de

[kypro]

Yes, and it's been quite obvious for a while. Search "Donald Trump" on a search engine like Yandex and you'll see radically different results than on Google. Here's an example from a search I did earlier this year, https://i.imgur.com/oPXP0wh.jpeg

I believe the explanation for this is that left-wing news sources have generally received higher fact check scores and Google now ranks search results by authoritative sources. As a side note, they seem to do this much more aggressively on YouTube and these days almost any search on YouTube will return videos from various mainstream media channels.

Being charitable, I do think right-wing news outlets have a problem with bias and misinformation and I can understand to some extent why sites like Fox News and Breitbart do not rank well in Google search, but on the other side, I also see huge amounts of bias and misinformation coming from left-wing outlets like CNN and The Guardian which rank comparatively very well.

There is a lot of soft censorship happening on the web today which most average internet users aren't aware of. The majority of search results and recommendations on tech platforms are far from neutral. For example, good luck finding anything negative about COVID vaccines on Google. Popular subreddits like CovidVaccinated are seemingly removed from Google search results completely probably because users on that subreddit tend to discuss the side effects they experienced after getting vaccinated or how they caught COVID despite being fully vaccinated, which obviously isn't good if you care about protecting the narrative that vaccines are 100% safe and effective. Again being charitable, you could argue that it's in the publics best interest not promote communities like CovidVaccinated, but right or wrong it should be understood that the content you are consuming is biased and deliberately altered to promote certain political narratives.

These days I do my best to avoid Reddit, Google and YouTube entirely when researching anything vaguely political because what I know what I will see is a biased representation of reality. The problem is most people don't understand the extent to which sites like Google and YouTube are biased and therefore believe what they're seeing is representative. And so should they decide to research COVID vaccines using Google there is only one conclusion it would be possible to come to.

[trahn]

Thanks for the detailed reply!

You reckon there's a market for a non-biased search engine? Just immediately came to mind... :)

[kypro]

Probably not. Anyone sceptical enough to use a "non-biased" search engine would be just as sceptical of the biases of any supposed "non-biased" competitor. Personally I'd argue there's not really such a thing as non-biased content. Everything produced by humans, either directly or indirectly is going to have some amount of bias.

It's also a balancing act to some extent. Is a search engine biased towards a certain political perspective but which reduces the amount of fake news better or worse than an unbiased search engine which weights fake news and accurate reporting equally? I think all you can really do is be aware of possible biases and question everything you're consuming.

My main concern with what Google and other tech platforms are doing is the subtleness which I suspect could be a deliberate move. Sites like Fox News still appear in Google results, but they just seem to be put significantly lower than other sources. Google knows 99% of people will look at the top 4-5 links, so as long as Fox News or other right-wing sources don't appear near the top you've effectively censored their content to 99% of Google's users without ever having to admit to doing anything nefarious because it's still technically there and maybe if you were explicit enough with your search it might even rank in the top results.

I don't really know what the answer is. I'd personally just urge people not to consume news, and if they're curious about anything just download official statistics. For example go ask people how many people they think will die this decade of smoking related diseases, or how many people are killed in terrorist incidents. Generally people don't know these numbers, despite the fact one kills millions and is rarely spoken about and the other is basically an irrelevant problem despite being discussed endlessly. Google is just a small part of what was already well established problem imo.