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The CanIRank analysis has weaknesses, most notably its reliance on four people's judgments. [...]the findings

are somewhat mixed:

A new study reopens a debate over whether Google's search results lean liberal, a bias that could influence

public opinion.

An analysis by online-search marketer CanIRank.com found that 50 recent searches for political terms on

Google surfaced more liberal-leaning webpages than conservative ones, as rated by a panel of four people.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google denies allegations of bias. "From the beginning, our approach to search has been to

provide the most relevant answers and results to our users, and it would undermine people's trust in our

results, and our company, if we were to change course," a Google spokeswoman said in an email.

The company says its search results are "determined by algorithms using hundreds of factors" and "reflect

the content and information that is available on the internet."

The CanIRank analysis has weaknesses, most notably its reliance on four people's judgments. Moreover, the

findings are somewhat mixed: The searches surfaced more pages rated as "liberal" than "conservative" on a

5-point scale, but more pages were rated "very conservative" than "very liberal."

Still, the report's findings may fuel concerns about the influence of a handful of internet companies and their

often-opaque computer programs. Facebook Inc. is battling accusations that it widely circulated false news

stories during the presidential campaign.

"We're talking about a historical level of control over the public sphere," said Zeynep Tufekci, a University of

North Carolina professor who studies technology's impact on society. Google's search engine prioritizes

certain websites over others, she said. "The question of how this works...is a healthy question to raise for a

democracy."

The CanIRank analysis echoes a study from the University of Maryland in December that found searches for

the names of Democratic presidential candidates displayed more supportive websites than did searches for

Republican candidates.

Google Search Results Can Lean Liberal, Study Finds; The conclusions stoke a debate about the influence of a handful of internet companies Nicas, Jack.Wall Street Journal (Online)Wall Street Journal (Online); New York, N.Y.; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]21 Nov 2016: n/a.

https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.uncg.edu/indexinglinkhandler/sng/au/Nicas,+Jack/$N?accountid=14604

https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.uncg.edu/pubidlinkhandler/sng/pubtitle/Wall+Street+Journal+$28Online$29/$N/105983/DocView/1841885833/fulltext/18801E7F3B8948B8PQ/1?accountid=14604

http://www.dowjones.com/

Google has faced accusations of a liberal slant. Over the summer, a pop-culture site claimed Google's

autocomplete feature hid negative suggested searches for Hillary Clinton, which Google denied.

The University of Maryland and CanIRank analyses are among the few, if only, attempts to measure any

potential bias in Google results.

CanIRank, which helps websites rank higher in Google results, in October conducted Google searches on

desktop computers for 50 political terms--from "abortion" and "ISIS" to "hillary clinton illness" and "donald

trump lies"--and collected the first 40 results for each search.

A panel of four people--two conservatives and two liberals with backgrounds in politics and online search--

then ranked each page on a political spectrum on a one-to-five-point scale, with five being the most

conservative. The panel ranked each page on its own merits, meaning one Wikipedia page or Wall Street

Journal article could be ranked differently than another. The company said the panel agreed unanimously on

nearly half the pages, and were within one point on the spectrum for nearly 90% of them.

Of the roughly 2,000 pages analyzed, the panel rated 31% as liberal and 22% as conservative. The remaining

47% of pages were rated neutral, including many from government or mainstream news websites.

Search results for "minimum wage" slanted liberal, for instance, while results for "does gun control reduce

crime" slanted conservative. Some searches delivered a nearly even mix of liberal, conservative and

nonpartisan pages, including those for "financial regulation," "estate tax," and "federal reserve."

Academics who study Google's search algorithm said any biases are likely unintentional and may reflect the

composition of the internet. The most important criteria in Google's ranking algorithm are how many other

sites link to a page, the relevance of the page's content to the search query and the overall quality of the

page, according to online-search marketers.

The academics theorized that liberals create more content--and link to each other--more frequently than sites

created by conservatives.

"Google is basically a popularity engine in the sense that the more links you have, the higher you're ranked,"

said Nick Diakopoulos, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland who studies algorithms and a co-

author of the study on candidates' names . "If you have a larger cluster on the left and more linking between

those pages, it's a self-reinforcing thing."

That system has helped insulate Google from the controversy over fake news because, unlike Facebook,

Google's search engine rarely surfaces fringe websites that distribute propaganda. But academics say the

search algorithm's opacity is still a concern, given Google's dominant role.

"No one really knows what (Google's search engine) is doing," said Christo Wilson, a Northeastern University

computer-science professor who has studied online search. "This is a big, complex system that's been

evolving for 15 years."

Write to Jack Nicas at [email protected]