First appearance on FOX — Google is ranking Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign website in a more favorable position in its search engine results than former President Trump's official website, according to a new study by the Media Research Center.
“Google is strategizing in favor of Kamala Harris” Media Research Center Founder Brent Bozell said: Fox News Digital.
“Google's search engine is pushing left-leaning media articles supporting Kamala Harris and condemning Donald Trump,” he added. “Don't trust Google searches.”
Researchers at MRC Free Speech America analyzed the results of two separate searches on September 6th for “Donald Trump Election 2024” and “Kamala Harris Election 2024.”
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Google ranks Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign website more favorably in its search engine results than former President Trump's official website, according to a new study by the Media Research Center.
A conservative media watchdog group wanted to see where each candidate's presidential campaign website showed up in a Google search, but found disparate results that favored Harris.
“In the past, Google has hidden the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now, the search giant is padding search results for political candidates with decidedly left-leaning legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and neutral or favorable to Democrats,” Gabriella Pariseau, deputy editor of MRC Free Speech America, wrote in summarizing the findings.
“Readers will have to sift through biased news before even looking at the organic results of a search, let alone a candidate's website,” Pariseau continued.
When searching for “Donald Trump President 2024,” the former president's campaign website came up as the sixth Google search result.
“But before landing on Trump's website, readers see the option to click through seven articles from left-leaning sources. The 'Top Stories' panel lists The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post,” Pariseau wrote.
“Once MRC researchers landed on the actual search results, Google showed them a link to an Economist article titled, 'Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris: Who's Leading in the Polls?' The results also showed a link to CNN's elections page and its live election coverage. Google also showed a link to NBC's live election coverage page,” she added, noting that Tim Graham, editor-in-chief of MRC Newsbusters, had found a “blatant left-leaning bias” in many of the articles suggested by Google.
However, when MRC Free Speech America researchers searched for “Kamala Harris for President 2024,” her campaign website appeared third in Google's organic search results. Moreover, the suggested articles were primarily from left-leaning media.
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According to the Media Research Center, former President Trump's official website ranks lower in Google searches than Vice President Kamala Harris' website. (Ken Blevins/Star-News)
“Nearly every article that appeared above Harris' website in the search results was related to historian Alan Lichtman's prediction that Harris would win the 2024 election,” Pariseau wrote.
“This blatant left-leaning bias is especially concerning given that an increasing number of American adults get their news from search, according to a November 2023 Pew Research Center survey,” Pariseau continued. “The survey found that 15% of American adults prefer to get their news from a search engine, up from 13% in 2022 and 11% in 2021.”
A Google spokesman denied the investigation.
“Both campaign websites consistently rank highly for relevant and common search queries. This report looked at one unusual search term from a single day over a month ago, and both candidates' websites ranked highly in Google search results for that search,” a Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
Some Google defenders argue that Trump's campaign site appears higher in Google searches than other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo, and others point out that if you search just “Donald Trump” on Google, the campaign site always appears as the top result, not “Donald Trump President-Election 2024.”
Researchers at MRC Free Speech America also found the placement of the Trump and Harris websites to be noteworthy: A 2023 study by search engine optimization expert Brian Dean found that the sixth result on a search engine (where Google placed Trump's website) typically received just under half the click-throughs as the third result (where Google placed Harris' website).
“This comes after an earlier study by MRC Free Speech America, which prompted Google to conduct searches related to Kamala Harris, found that across four searches, Google favored left-leaning media by a ratio of 17:2 in Google Search and 19:2 in the Google News tab,” Pariseau wrote.
The Harris campaign manipulated news headlines and injected pro-Kamala bias into Google ads.
According to the Media Research Center, Google searches are favoring Vice President Kamala Harris. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Martin)
MRC told Fox News Digital that Google Search “uses special algorithms to run each new search as if it were the first time the search was being performed on a so-called 'clean' computer or phone.”
A “clean” computer means that you have no previous search history or tracking cookies that may affect the results you get when searching, and the MRC algorithm is not logged into any accounts while performing the search.
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