From Craig Nelsen’s UnGoogle.US:
Yes, Google puts its thumb on the scale
…I took a few random words from a few random articles by a few random writers—some on the left and some on the right—and ran searches on a few different search engines. Then I counted to see what position the article came up in. These were the results.
Left-wing writers ranked generally higher in Google than in the other search engines, but for right-wing writers it is a completely different story. Over and over again, searches that produced articles by conservatives at the top or near the top in all the other search engines, produced nothing—not ranked at all—in Google!* (Yippy gave the best results, i.e., ranked the original article higher, for both right-wing writers and left-wing writers.) (View full results here.)
Google’s bias is stark, and that should concern anyone—left or right, writer or reader—who abhors totalitarianism and the concentration of power in the hands of a few—anyone who values intellectual and political freedom.
Writers need readers to be successful. Earning a living writing is a very tough thing to do. It is an outrage that Google, which receives something like 90 percent of the world’s search traffic, effectively blocks that traffic from access to the work of writers who don’t share Google’s worldview.
