The Politics Of: Google vs. Bing

Is there a hidden bias to search engine giants Google and Bing? Let's ask the web!

From The Free Republic:

Fox and Friends highlighted this on Friday with the Good Friday issue and google. Also they have pointed out that google prevents certain searches for muslim info that may make them look bad, while they still allow the same search for Christianity.

Remember compare www.google.com to www.bing.com

Do yourself and our faith a favor and drop-kick google to the curb.

From SurvivalistBoards:

OK, I've been using Yahoo for a long time. Lately it seems they are kicking me out of sites/stories that are conservative.

Are there more "like-minded" search engines??

I'm not really a computer guy, so maybe I'm not asking the right thing. I am assuming that Yahoo is a search engine. I use it currently as a home page and an e-mail account.

Thanks. and stay ready....

Apparently Google did, in fact, remove content from its News page due to complaints about hate speech from conservative blogs:

After sending the Google Help Desk a query concerning the matter, Salvato was informed that there had been complaints of "hate speech" at his website, and as a result, The New Media Journal would no longer be part of Google News. As evidence of his offense, the Google Team supplied Salvato with links to three recent op-eds published by his contributing writers, all coincidentally about radical Islam and its relation to terrorism.

I'm not sure that was such a "coincidence"--but still ...

The SonicFrog blog finds that Google is promoting his more "liberal" posts but not his more conservative ones. He notes that searching Limbaugh, for example, finds lefty sites talking about Rush ahead of, say, Rush actually saying what he says. He reasons:

if Google is truly favoring left / liberal biases in its search matrics, is it time for Conservatives to launch their own search engine service? I mean, this is why Conservative talk radio and FOX news have been so successful. There was an open niche, a political vacuum, just waiting to be filled!

Does Google Favor Liberals?
The issue of Google's search politics reached a boiling point last Easter when, instead of something related to Jesus, Google put up this doodle on its home-page:

Will Liberals See Caesar Chavez When They Die?

It was noted that back in 2000 Google had traditional Easter Eggs--but people (Conservatives, at least) still think they detect a liberal bias in the works at Google. Whether it be Google bombs (Dan Savage's Santorum page), image links (for a long time if you typed Miserable Failure into Google image search you got George Bush (note: this was not just on Google), and so on.

2Close2Reality suggests that:

You all should know by now that Bing.com is Microsoft’s search engine.

I give them credit for at least having pretty fair information on last year’s election.

Google was caught censoring out some pro-Romney stuff.

I want you to test it out this week with Google and Bing. Perform the same searches on both.

Which gives you more relevant results?

Tonight I was doing a search on a topic that makes the liberals shrivel up. Google’s results were less focused than I expected.

What Do We Know?
There are two facts that are pretty much incontestable:

1. Google's employees backed Obama in the 2012 election. As did Google's CEO Eric Schmidt.
2. Google can apply a "manual adjustment" (or penalty) to lower your visibility. They are generally expected to tell you that they did and why they did it.

Is it possible that Google is doing this, on the sly, to conservative media?

Let's Do The Test

Let's put some items into Google and Bing. To start with 'Conservatives are'

Analysis: In the top 4 they are both pretty hard on conservatives save for Bing #01 which links to a report that Conservatives are happier than liberals. Both include 'stupid' and 'idiots' but Google has 'evil' and 'racist,' neither of which appear on Bing at all.

Left vs. Right: Google is LEFT, Bing is RIGHT.

How about 'Liberals Are'

Analysis: In the top four Bing has four negative words. Google has 3 (Google #04 is 'cool'). Bing doubles down with "stupid" and "so stupid." It also uses 'hypocrites' twice.

Left vs. Right: Google is LEFT, Bing is RIGHT.

Let's try 'Obama Is'

Analysis: I LOL'd at 'checking your email' but it's not even close. While neither is complimentary, Google never reaches 'the Antichrist' or 'evil' and invites us to 'watch the proof' on the gay issue.

Left vs. Right: Google is LEFT, Bing is RIGHT.

Okay--'Romney Was'

Analysis: This is moderately balanced--although "mentally ill" shows up first for Google and 'a bully' is is at Bing #04. I'll count calling Romney 'a democrat' as negative but I think two 'rights' at the top of Bing beat out  'mentally ill' at the top of Google.

Left vs. Right: Google is LEFT, Bing is RIGHT.

What's Going On?

It is far more difficult to analyze the News pages which are likely more "material" to guiding viewer's intake of information. Both were roughly equivalent and had a complex enough layout that I wasn't able to easily determine if there was active promotion going on (I use memorandum.com as my news homepage for reasons that will be obvious when you click on it).

But here's what I think: I believe that Bing is--and this is a theory based on an extensive 30 minutes of research--a more conservative-friendly search engine than Google. Now, I am not sure if this is because of mechanical intent or because more conservatives are using it and the learning algorithms lead it in that direction. There's no way for me to tell.

But I will tell you this: there is a great appetite for conservative-friendly services today in America and Bing has had difficulty competing with Google in several key respects (note: Blogger, owned by Google, red-underlies Bing but does not underline Excel or PowerPoint ...). You cannot brand your search engine "conservative"--it'd be the kiss of death--but you can put up auto-completes that send a signal "we're one of you" to prospective searchers. 

While the ability to rate a page by its political leanings is non-trivial (these guys tried--where are they today?) we certainly do know a lot about positive and negative terms (Twitter has made a deep study of this--and can even potentially detect sarcasm and significant relations like 'Romney is a [democrat]'). 

Could Bing be intentionally pandering to the niche that made FOX News number one for many years?

I'll have to say it's possible based on what I've seen here.