A week after a House Judiciary Committee hearing on search engine bias, Donald Trump was still crying wolf on Twitter, alleging tech companies like Google and the very platform he tweets upon favor his political rivals.
According to data from analytics firm Brandwatch, Trump has tweeted about bias at least 25 times since taking office. And it was up to Google CEO Sundar Pichai to explain how the search giant processes 3.5 billion queries daily without a liberal agenda. Even though Pichai testified that he leads “this company without political bias and work[s] to ensure that [Google’s] products continue to operate that way,” Republicans remained skeptical.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, for example, insisted, “Those who write the algorithms get the results they must want.” And Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, asked why negative news outranks positive coverage in searches for Republican legislative victories like the American Health Care Act or the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
The question of how exactly Google ranks search results has been hotly debated since the dawn of search engine optimization in the 1990s. And, to a degree, the only constant is change, as evidenced by a seemingly never-ending barrage of algorithm updates over the past 20 or so years with adorable names like Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, RankBrain, Mobilegeddon and Fred.
But that’s the thing—Google isn’t going to simply hand over the secret sauce recipe in the Big Mac that is its search results.
“Google’s dilemma is that they don’t want to reveal those inner workings, and they’re especially sensitive to any revelations around user signals impacting results, so they can’t reveal the evidence that would help disprove these conspiracy theories,” said Pete Meyers, marketing scientist at analytics firm Moz. “On a typical day, they’re more willing to take a minor PR hit than to reveal the inner workings of the algorithm.”
How Trump could be kind of, sort of right
The issue, however, is not black and white. In fact, Will Critchlow, CEO of online marketing firm Distilled, said there are multiple ways Google could, in fact, be biased.
What Trump, Smith and Chabot have referred to is active bias, meaning Google engineers are deliberately skewing the algorithm to align with their views. However, Critchlow noted another possible form: unconscious bias, meaning they are not intentionally trying to influence results, but the results they think are best happen to be those that align with their opinions.
“Another challenge is trying to tease apart deliberate [versus] accidental bias,” Meyers said. “Google could be training systems on biased data, for example, even if they don’t intend to.”
There’s also the issue of institutional bias, in which Google gives higher rankings to authoritative, trustworthy sites that are frequently cited and have long histories. And so Critchlow said Republicans may feel there is a bias toward less prominent sites because they see results from well-known sources like The New York Times and the Washington Post, which they also claim are biased.
“If you put the exact same article on The Washington Post and a new blog, the one on The Washington Post would outrank it,” Critchlow added. “That bias is there not for political reasons, but because it’s the best result over a broad range of queries.”
International SEO consultant Gianluca Fiorelli noted Google can also downgrade websites that have been flagged as untrustworthy if this has been verified using the fact-checking review ClaimReview Schema.
“The more … sites are flagged as not [trustworthy], the less they will be visible in organic search,” Fiorelli said.
Do reptiles make good pets?
In a blog post earlier this year, Danny Sullivan—the longtime search marketing reporter who now acts as a “search liaison” for the mother ship—addressed problems with featured snippets, which had resulted in answers like, “women are evil” and “Barack Obama is planning a coup.”