A new investigation has found that Google placed search results for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris' campaign website more prominently than the official site of her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, and buried search results for the Republican candidate beneath “left-leaning” content.
The conservative watchdog group Media Research Center discovered the discrepancy after analyzing search results for two separate search queries: “Donald Trump Elections 2024” and “Kamala Harris Elections 2024.”
When researchers at MRC Free Speech America searched for Harris' campaign on September 6, the result was third, below articles about proposed vice presidents from left-leaning media outlets that have supported Harris, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico.
The same search for Trump turned up the sixth result on the first page of results, but below other content critical of the former president from the same media outlets, with no results from conservative publications like the New York Post.
“Google is strategizing in favor of Kamala Harris,” said Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center. He told Fox News Digital.
“Google's search engine pushes left-wing media articles supporting Kamala Harris and condemning Donald Trump. Don't trust Google Search.”
The research that will determine where Google places each candidate's presidential campaign website has further fueled criticism of the tech giant's left-leaning bias. Last month, the company was accused of distorting search results about Trump's candidacy and removing an assassination attempt on the former president from its autocorrect feature.
“In the past, Google has hidden the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now, the search giant is padding search results for political candidates with older, explicitly left-leaning news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and neutral or favorable to Democrats,” Gabriella Parisot, 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.”
Tim Graham, editor-in-chief of MRC Newsbusters, added that the search results returned links to articles from CNN, NBC and other outlets with a “blatant left-wing bias.”
A Washington Post analysis of the same search terms on Thursday found that results from the Trump campaign website appeared at the bottom of the first page, under “Sponsored Posts,” after a trove of content from left-leaning sites.
Harris' results appeared higher on the page, but not as high as the MRC analysis, and included articles from The Times, CNN and NBC, but not The Post or The Wall Street Journal.
“Nearly every article that appeared above Ms. Harris' website in the search results related to historian Alan Lichtman's prediction that Ms. Harris would win the 2024 election,” Pariseau wrote, referring to the MRC research.
“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 survey.”
According to the MRC survey, 15% of U.S. adults prefer to get their news from search engines, up from 13% in 2022 and 11% in 2021.
Pariseau argues that the placement of Trump and Harris' websites is particularly noteworthy: A 2023 study by search engine optimization expert Brian Dean found that appearing as the sixth result in a search engine typically gets just under half the click-through of the third result, according to Fox Digital.
“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.
A Google spokesman denied the investigation.
“Both campaign websites consistently rank highly in search results for relevant and common search queries. For this report, we looked at one uncommon search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and both candidates' websites ranked highly in Google search results for that search, too,” the representative told Fox News Digital.
The Washington Post has reached out to Google for comment.
