Guest essay by Leo Goldstein
A Method of Google Search Bias Quantification and Its Application in Climate Debate and General Political Discourse
Abstract
The percentage of domain traffic, referred by Google Search, net of brand searches (PGSTN), tends to be in or around the range 25%-30% for a broad class of web domains. This hypothesis is tested by calculating the correlation between the popularity of news/opinions websites and their PGSTN, and finding it to be near zero. Thus, PGSTN can be used rigorously to detect and even quantify Google Search intentional bias. Intentional bias is the bias that has been introduced by internal Google decisions, and unrelated to external factors, such as the dominance of particular viewpoints on the web. Here, the PGSTN method is applied for intentional bias detection about climate debate and in general political discourse.
Google Search is found to be extremely biased in favor of climate alarmism and against climate realism. The PGSTN ranges for climate realism and climate alarmism do not even overlap! Some of the most important climate realist domains, including low-controversial judithcurry.com, have such a low PGSTN that they can be considered blacklisted by Google.
Google Search is found to be biased in favor of left/liberal domains and against conservative domains with a confidence of 95%. Further, certain hard-Left domains have such a high PGSTN that their standing raises suspicions that they have been hand-picked for prominent placement. Certain respected conservative domains are blacklisted.
Introduction
Left-liberal political bias in Google Search has been noticed for years. See Robert Epstein et al, A Method for Detecting Bias in Search Rankings, with Evidence of Systematic Bias Related to the 2016 Presidential Election; Todd Dunning’s 2015-09-15 comment; Leo Goldstein, Why are Search Engines so Hostile to Climate Realism?
These observations have not completely resolved the question whether the bias was intentional, or reflected the biased web content. Recently, Google’s official Search Evaluation Guidelines have shown intentional bias against climate realism. At least one former Google employee claimed intentional demotion of “anything non-PC” by the Google Search team.
This paper uses published SEO data from multiple sources, including BrightEdge Research, 2017: Organic Search Is Still the Largest Channel, updating its 2014 report. From here on, the term ‘bias’ means intentional bias. This paper formulates, substantiates, and applies a quantitative method of bias detection in Google Search.
Methods
It is known that Google Search provides 25%-30% of the user’s traffic to an average website. As Google executives and PR repeated many times, Google Search service exists to provide the most relevant and useful results to the user’s queries. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt even joked that there should be only one result for each query – the result that the user seeks. Google servers crawl the whole web, extracting text, links, and other data from trillions of pages. Google constantly and successfully fights attempts to artificially promote websites through collusive linking, and other search engine optimization techniques. In its undertaking, Google also uses an enormous amount of off-web information, which it collects through Chrome browser, other Google applications and services, analytics beacons, domains registrar status, and so on. This information includes domains popularity and ownership. Google also processes immediate feedback from the users in the form of frequency of clicks on the results, bounce rate, the frequency of repeated searches with modified terms, etc.
Google is very good at its job. Sites and domains that are less popular with the visitors tend to be less likely to receive traffic from Google, and vice versa. The effect is that percentage of net traffic that domains receive from Google Search tends to be similar across web domains! This fact is illustrated by nearly zero correlation between domain popularity and percentage of net traffic it receives from Google within each of the sets of the left/liberal media and conservative media, despite the domain popularity (according to Alexa.com, lower values mean higher popularity), varying from 24 to 1,469 for the left/liberal media set, and from 56 to 12,795 for the conservative media set. Traffic from Google ads is about 5% of the total Google traffic, so it is not a factor. “Net traffic,” used throughout this research, excludes traffic received from the users, intentionally searching for the website by its name (i.e., searches for ‘foxnews’ and ‘fox news’ are excluded from the net traffic for foxnews.com). Net traffic better reflects Google intent, because Google Search does not have much choice when the user searches for a website by its name or brand. Alexa.com provides information which allows PGSTN calculation for hundreds of thousands of web domains.
Given the robustness of PGSTN, I conclude that statistically significant difference in PGSTN between a priori defined sets of comparable domains is due to intentional bias by Google, unless there is another good explanation.
Methodological Details
All the data in this research is based on Alexa (free version) snapshots from September 4, 2017. For each domain, Google Search Total was taken from “Upstream Sites | Which sites did people visit immediately before this site?” table. Branded traffic was taken from the “Top Keywords from Search Engines | Which search keywords send traffic to this site?” table. It should be noted that only five top values, appearing in the free Alexa snapshots, were used. All Google search domains shown in the table were included (google.com, google.ca, google.co.uk, google.co.in etc.) If the total of the branded traffic were less than 5%, the value 1% was entered. PGSTN was calculated by deducting branded search traffic from the total Google Search traffic.
PGSTN is not expected to provide sufficient certainty for individual domains, because multiple factors influence it, including possible error in Alexa data. Nevertheless, the Google attitude toward a domain has been provisionally noted and color coded in the attached spreadsheet PGSTN-Domains.xlsx as follows:
Whitelist / Green Light: >36%
Normal: 20%-36%
Grey Area: 12%-20%
Blacklist: <=12%
Most domains were expected (based on the cited SEO research) to have PGSTN in the 20%-36% range. This expectation has been met. PGSTN <= 12% provisionally indicates that the domain is blacklisted by Google. Everything between the blacklist and the normal range is considered a grey area. Finally, PGSTN > 36% provisionally indicates unusual favoritism by Google.
Google Bias in Climate Debate
The domains were selected mostly according to Alexa classification. Detection of extreme bias Google Search has against climate realism did not require statistical methods.
There is a huge gap between PGSTN of realism domains (6.3% – 17.4%), and PGSTN of climate alarmism domains (23.5%-52.4%). The gap is 6.1%. Except for drroyspencer.com, all climate realism domains are blacklisted by Google (PGSTN is 6.3% – 11.0%).
On the other hand, self-appointed “fact checkers,” including snopes.com and politifact.com have PGSTN about 50%. That gives ground to the suspicion that they had been hand-picked by Google for prioritization. Another two sites with suspiciously high PGSTN are sourcewatch.org (PGSTN = 50.1%) and prwatch.org (PGSTN = 40.9%). These two sites grossly exchange links (they refer to each other as the source), have overlapping content, and are known to Google to belong to the same organization, the Center for Media and Democracy. These are well-known signs of spam – yet Google has not only failed to downrank them as spam, but likely manually prioritized them.
This section includes netrootsnation.org, a site of a radical left conference, not specifically geared toward climate alarmism. Its PGSTN = 44.5%. This domain could have been hand-picked or its owners had been advised by Google insiders on gaming the rankings. Google has funded the conference, and Google representatives attended it and made presentations on relevant subjects, like this one. A quote:
“We’ll share some ways to leverage the power of online video and how to integrate Google and YouTube’s tools with other advocacy efforts.”
All other alarmist domains have PGSTN in the whitelisted or normal range.
Google Bias in General Political Discourse
To quantify Google general political bias, I selected top U.S. news and opinions sites by their ranking in Alexa, then added some lower ranking conservative sites based on my personal knowledge and/or Alexa suggestions. There was an element of subjectivity in selection and classification, and I omitted some domains that I could not classify. Nevertheless, the most popular domains in both left/liberal (including Left, Mainstream Liberal, and Mainstream Center) and conservative (including Conservative and Mainstream Conservative) categories have been selected and classified rigorously, and use of weighted statistics minimized the element of subjectivity in the results.
The results show that Google Search is heavily biased against conservative domains, and some respectable conservative domains seem to be blacklisted:
thegatewaypundit.com
pjmedia.com
americanthinker.com
redstate.com
powerlineblog.com
drudgereport.com
There might be an alternative or additional explanation for low PGSTN of the Drudge Report – the site mostly consists of links to articles on other sites, a practice Google looks down on.
On average, the conservative domains have almost two times lower PGSTN than the left/liberal ones: conservative 15.5% (standard deviation 5.1%) vs. left/liberal 27.4% (standard deviation 4.9%). Hypothesis of Google Search left/liberal bias is confirmed with a confidence of 95%.
Discussion
Although PGSTN of individual domains is not sufficient for conclusions, I cannot avoid noticing that extremist websites, such as dailystormer.com (PGSTN = 13.6%; ceased to exist by the time of the research) and dailykos.com (PGSTN = 20.2%) are preferred by Google over many conservative and climate realist domains.
Conclusions
Google Search is biased in favor of left/liberal websites against conservative websites, and is extremely biased in favor of climate alarmism against climate realism.
Disclosure
I hold short positions in Google stock.
References
The references are in the body of the article.
Supplementary Materials
Alexa snapshots are available from https://defyccc.com/data/PGSTN-Snapshots.7z (compressed with 7-Zip).
Contact Author: Leo Goldstein, DefyCCC.com, ah@defyccc.com
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Google for: google public utility conservatives
at https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=google+public+utility+conservatives&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Here are a couple of hits from that search:
The Atlantic: Steve Bannon Wants to Change How the Law Treats Google – The …
at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi1rP2N4ZXWAhUJyGMKHb5GAJEQFgg6MAM&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2017%2F08%2Fsteve-bannon-google-facebook%2F535473%2F&usg=AFQjCNHkrAmyvvBnky6hyK3jwQCjhblhuw
National Review: Silicon Valley’s Anti-Conservative Bias: The Solution Is to Treat Major …
at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi1rP2N4ZXWAhUJyGMKHb5GAJEQFgg0MAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Farticle%2F450476%2Fsilicon-valleys-anti-conservative-bias-solution-treat-major-tech-companies-utilities&usg=AFQjCNFa7IUrVsakKrNZr62nJl_5jAJxjQ
Not disagreeing, but I’d also like to see comparisons with Yahoo and other search engines.
This sort of thing is what will draw government intervention, by the US or EU most likely. The history of the government dealing with telecom and media in general is also rather bad, and Google should try to reform to head off the intervention.
Imagine the Web run by one’s least favorite set of government bureaucrats, such as the DMV, the IRS, or school administrations in the US (I am sure non-US readers can nominate their own least favorite group). That is what we are possibly headed for.
Part of the reason for Google’s bias is, I suspect, threats from the EU to punish sites that publicize or promote fake news (the EU might consider climate skepticism to be fake) and hate speech.
Right.
google’s ipo was sponsored by the nsa.
they are government from the beginning.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-29/why-google-made-nsa
Eric Schmidt runs google and he is a total commie. Lock stock and barrel. He is a classic monopolist commie. He was backing Hillary to the hilt (and using Google resources to do it) because he was promised no anti-trust action.
Mr. Sessions, sir, you’re up! Just start an investigation into Goolag, FakeBook & Twatter, and watch the search results get more realistic.
Very true TRM, but Schmidt is even worse than your comments suggest. In the 2012 election season, the Obama “ground game” was enhanced greatly by a team of data miners exploiting Google’s info. After that election, Eric Schmidt formally hired many of that team and, with his own money, formed Civis Analytics to market their “services.” Initially the Civis website, civisanalytics.com, explicitly stated that its political data would be available exclusively to liberal entities. It has now slightly played down that policy, but the bias is still clear. [Click their link – Services > Expertise > Politics & Advocacy] IMHO Google is not just bad, but very close to evil.
It is easy to install Ixquick or Startpage in Safari and Firefox. The only Google product I ever intentionally use is Google Earth. It’s overlay options tend to “lean left” but it is useful and handy.
Bit confused here. Are there actually people who sincerely believe that Google is NOT strongly Liberally biased?? Are there really people like that in the world?
I think you are referring to the “all other” category that was recently been relabeled hate groups. It’s the new binary system from the Bay Area.
It’s high time we break up Google. The relentless Lunatic Left must be resisted, and de-funded: It’s also high time for an end to all Fed dollars to Leftist madrassas, AKA American colleges and universities. There must be blowback against the toxic, stifling, partisan sanctimony of the Left.
Google is funded by users and advertisements. In fact, all the ads on this site come from Google.
Congratulations! You wrote a reply that has NOTHING to do with what I said! Well done!
And who’s surprised?
What about ” Dogpile ” ?
Why is the right so helpless? Why are all the major search engines left leaning? Why does the left, academia, institutions choose Apple over other companies – they are as capitalist and free enterprise as you can get? They are most guilty of child and sweat shop labor practices.
Leo another informative article but It tells us that those who would want an apolitical internet are doomed to be helpless pawns of clever lefty manipulatiin. Can any one answer my questions? Why can’t the right set up internet search engines to countervail this. How about a set up where websites are automatically classified by volume of traffic and advertise the fact. Can one have charges laid or have an investigation opened on predatory, unfair, business practices?
Only reporting the sinking of the Titanic if you have means to save the situation is not of any use.
I think there are many factors, but persecution of people with centrist and right-of-center views over 8 years of Obama administration is the most obvious one. Persecution was sometimes direct, like using IRS against Tea Party, but more frequently indirect, like threatening corporations who dared to fund or to employ climate skeptics.
I agree, we should stop being helpless, and to start filing lawsuits for fraud, RICO, and other violations.
Biasing search results isn’t the only thing they are in the dock for. Hoovering up unbelievable amounts of information about you as you live online is their secret sauce. It was thought it would only be useful for marketing purposes but maybe the way things are going political purposes could be served too.
How to avoid Google if you want to? There are plenty of choices. A good search engine to use is DuckDuckGo. Or use StartPage which uses google but hides from them who is using it. Epic is a popular and easy to use browser that respects privacy. Tor or JonDonym is for those that want even more privacy. Tor has been treated with suspicion due to rumours of being hacked/created by NSA but Jondonym is German based and seems to have a good rep.
I don’t do anything online that make me worry about privacy but you always wonder what may be used against you in the future by those who see you as the ‘enemy’ given the wealth of information they have on you.
Do a google search for “American inventors” and see the images it brings up. It includes among its most notable luminaries the first female millionaire in the U.S. Madam C. J. Walker, who developed a line of hair care products in the early 1900s. Oh, and they do include Thomas Edison.
So their built in bias goes well beyond politics.
+1 interesting
In Google’s defence, other search engines like Bing return similar results.
I suspect a possible reason is that what would previously have been described as a black person who was also an inventor (if skin color/race was mentioned at all) is now described as an “African American”. Thus white inventors are probably less frequently tagged as “American” than black inventors.
Search engines really are still pretty dumb.
Google can either be a content provider orca common carrier.
But not both.
So the best way to get counted is to have all opinion with no links to outside sources. That explains the observation of liberal bias in the results. It could be the first evidence for global manifestation of personality traits on the internet….or a thumb on the controls in the Bay Area.
Strange that nobody has mentioned yandex.com. It is certainly the non-Google search engine with the best coverage (in many cases actually better than Google). Admittedly the FSB/SVR will probably be tracking what You are doing but that is hardly very scary these days and arguably safer than having NSA/FBI doing it.
Well no shit… Google favors high quality pages over low quality ones. And climate change is real, and so they are going to favor facts and realism.
So Google decides what “quality” and “facts” are based on its own opinion rather than user interest, and you’re OK with that? Stock prices are based on buyer interest in the stocks. Would you like Google to determine stock prices based on their own “expertise” instead? If they are so much better at determining quality and facts than the public, why not?
WUWT is second most viewed climate related website, behind only NASA’s website. It presents scientific papers everyday on a variety of topics and allows open discussion and debate. It also allows people with differing opinions to join the discussion. Name me one other climate website that has those qualities.
You don’t understand, allowing people who don’t agree with the consensus to be heard is precisely why this site is low quality.
/sarc
So any site you agree with is high quality.
Good to know that you consider yourself the standard by which all others must be judged.
Yes, climate change is real, it has been going on since the earth cooled down enough to have an atmosphere.
However the claim that CO2 is the primary driver of this change has been completely refuted.
Unfortunately, the bias at Google is institutional, much like it is at many SV companies, especially the top tier ones. The reason is the emphasis on hiring people fresh out of elite Universities where those impressionable young minds have been polluted with far left ideology presented as ‘for the greater good’. Isn’t this the same methodology that drives Communism and Socialism? If you can’t delude the followers to believe it’s all for the greater good, they won’t follow and if you get them young enough, they won’t know any better …
Other possible reasons for SV bias may be their dependence on foreign sales and leaning to “global governance” (anti-Americanism), political pressure from Democrats under Obama government and Californian looneys and moonbeams, and corrupting influence of Al Gore.
Leo,
There can be no doubt that Moonbeam Brown is on the loony side of politics. Unfortunately, he was voted in to power which only goes to show how uninformed and.or gullible most of the residents here seem to be … Plus, we have Pelosi. Need I say more?
Is there any data on how other search engines like Bing do in comparison to Google in regards to climate and politics?
I rarely come to WUWT through a Google search, because I’m always using my bookmark to WUWT. I’m always going to Snopes through a Google search because I’m searching for a topic rather than searching specifically for Snopes’ home page (whatever that might look like).
What does PGSTN stand for?
“The percentage of domain traffic, referred by Google Search, net of brand searches (PGSTN) …”
(Opening sentence)
Of interest and relevant:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-do-not-think-tank/article/2009599
Leo, it is probably correct that Google downplays conservative claims, but this is not the same as having a “bias” against such claims. There is a difference between “downplaying” something and having a “bias” against something.
This distinction is important – being “biased” against something suggests you minimize something because it goes against your beliefs or interests, while “downplaying” something may be the natural response to claims contrary to current scientific wisdom. There are many examples that illustrate the difference between maliciously downplaying something (having a bias), and simply ignoring claims the scientific community doesn’t take seriously.
If you consult the literature on evolutionary biology, you will conclude that there is a strong “bias” against the Lamarckian view of evolution – this bias is simply a downplaying of a view very few scientists support. Likewise, if you look at publications such as Science or Nature, you will find there is “favoritism” towards papers that describe and quantify the anthropogenic aspect of Global Warming.
Ah Yes! the pure driven snow of truth and beauty.
Who could believe that AGW was not going to destroy us all.
We should not let the weak minded be led astray, like those terrible Lamarckian days.
The cause is noble, the truth revealed, CO2 is destroying us and we are to blame.
No error or deviation from the settled science, no jot of inconvenient evidence, no thought of rebellion will mark the perfect algorithm.The wisdom of science will save us.
As for debate, well, its settled, so there, lets move on to a bright and glorious future.
Everyone agrees, Google proves this. Why the kerfuffle?
Ironically, though people shy away from calling it Lamarkian, stable heritable traits not encoded by DNA sequence are now very well established and extensively researched. “Epigenetics” is the term usually used.
Back on topic, I am not especially surprised by the claims because the bulk of the MSM probably is anti-Conservative and most definitely is global-warming-alarmist. Given the importance of large-media output in Google searches and rankings, I would not really expect to see anything other than the bias reported here. Quantifying it accurately seems like the biggest difficulty.
Good points. But Google also employs (or plans to employ) certain subjectively tinged quality metrics (to downgrade fake news, for instance), beyond the quantitative ones you mentioned.
Control the information available, you control the conclusions reached.
The Google promise “Google Search service exists to provide the most relevant and useful results to the user’s queries.” This paper and its conclusion shows, ne proves, that this advertised promise is not met. That constitutes false advertising. A class action suit awarding several hundred dollars to each and every past and present google user would be a suitable alternative for Mr Schmidt not spending some time in federal prison.
Just my opinion.
WoW NW sage great point. There’s massive damages in there on some of the several sides.
+100
I googled “global warming,” The first two pages of references appeared to support the climate alarmists’ narrative on climate change 100 percent. That’s enough quantification of bias for me
The internet censor and Google Senior Adviser