OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Once again, the far-left CEOs running the world’s biggest search engine, Google, appear to be skewing search results in favor of the Democratic candidate for president, according to a Thursday report.
According to a recent study by the Media Research Center, Google has prominently featured Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign website in a more favorable position on its search engine results compared to former President Trump’s official site, Fox News reported.
“Google is trying to stack the deck in favor of Kamala Harris,” Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell told Fox News Digital.
“Google’s search engine pushes left-wing media articles favoring Kamala Harris and slamming Donald Trump,” he added. “Don’t trust Google searches.”
MRC Free Speech America researchers examined the Sept. 6 results of two separate searches: “Donald Trump presidential race 2024” and “Kamala Harris presidential race 2024.”
The conservative media watchdog aimed to assess the placement of each candidate’s presidential campaign website on Google Search but found that the results were skewed in favor of Kamala Harris, Fox noted.
Google has done this before, the center noted.
“In the past, Google buried the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now the search giant very clearly pads its search results about political candidates with leftist legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favorable toward Democrats,” MRC Free Speech America associate editor Gabriela Pariseau wrote in a summary of the findings.
“Readers will have to sift through the biased news before they even see the organic results of their searches, let alone a candidate’s website,” Pariseau continued.
When researchers with MRC typed “Donald Trump presidential race 2024” into Google’s search box, the former president’s campaign website appeared sixth in Google search results.
“But before reaching Trump’s website, readers would see options to click on seven articles from left-wing sources. The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post were listed under the ‘Top Stories’ panel,” Pariseau noted in her summary.
“Once MRC researchers reached the actual search results, Google displayed a link to an article from The Economist titled ‘Donald Trump v Kamala Harris: who’s ahead in the polls?’ Additionally, the results showed CNN’s elections page along with a link to its live election updates. Google also displayed a link to NBC’s live election updates page,” she added, noting that MRC NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham found “blatant leftist bias” in many articles recommended by Google.
However, when researchers from MRC Free Speech America searched for “Kamala Harris presidential race 2024,” her campaign website appeared third in the organic Google search results. Additionally, the articles suggested were predominantly from left-leaning sources, Fox noted further.
“Nearly every article that appeared above Harris’s website in search results related to historian Allan Lichtman’s prediction that Harris will win the 2024 election,” Pariseau wrote.
“This overt leftist bias is especially concerning considering that according to a November 2023 Pew Research survey, a rising number of American adults receive their news from search,” Pariseau continued. “The study found that 15 percent of U.S. adults prefer to get their news from search engines which is up from 13 percent in 2022 and 11 percent in 2021.”
In August, Republicans demanded answers from Google after reports said that the Harris campaign was manipulating search results.
Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) “demanded answers from Google CEO Sundar Pichai related to the Kamala Harris campaign’s use of Google search ads to manipulate news headlines in a deliberate attempt to mislead voters by falsely suggesting endorsements from major news publications,” a news release noted.
“Google has a disturbing track record of implicit bias and election interference that overwhelmingly benefits one political party,” said Gooden. “If Google is unable or unwilling to take basic steps to safeguard the integrity of our elections, I will work with my colleagues to use every tool at our disposal to ensure accountability.”
Earlier this month, the Trump campaign shredded Harris for her “cozy ties with a high-powered attorney representing Google in an upcoming federal antitrust case,” the New York Post reported, adding that the former president sees it as an obvious “conflict of interest.”
The Trump campaign criticized Harris shortly after The Post revealed her close connections to the prestigious law firm Paul Weiss and its top litigator, Karen Dunn, a key player on Google’s defense team in the Biden-Harris Justice Department’s case against the company’s digital ad business.