Unlike with the majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine there is no guarantee that
what you will find is authoritative, accurate or even vaguely true. / Howard Rheingold
Myth: Google has the best search engine.
Fact: Google probably does have the most advanced search engine. Unfortunately, Google is so politically biased to the left that they manipulate and slant search results to the left as well. Therefore, if you want balanced results when performing a search on a political topic, do NOT use Google. Additionally, Google may be capturing your search results. Many of the alternate search engines came to being as alternatives that do NOT capture your searches and violate your privacy.
Myth: DuckDuckGo is a good search engine to avoid the big corporate media websites like the NY Times, Washington Post and CNN.
Fact: Whether searching in DuckDuckGo or just about any other search engine, the big corporate media websites will fill the top of your search. There is really no way around this except to filter the results to remove these websites. Without a filter there are numerous popular independent news sites that simply will never appear in your search results.
Overview:
To test the big-corporate news leftist bias of DuckDuckGo and Google, the following tests were performed. NOTE: When referring to “left-leaning” websites, these are according to the AllSides Media Bias Chart.
Test 1
A good test of the reliability of a search engine is to type “Ray Epps” into the search bar. This is a good search test because Revolver News (revolver.news) had the largest expose on him in 2021 in a piece called “Meet Ray Epps.” Revolver News has been the preeminent investigative news site into his involvement in the January 6, 2020 U.S. Capitol breach. Therefore, Revolver News should be the top result in a non-biased search engine. However, since Revolver News exposes news that is detrimental to the leftist agenda, it is suppressed or censored by search engines with a leftist bias. More/Less…
Following are the test results for Test 1 in various search engines:
DuckDuckGo – Searched down 754 results and did not find a single article from Revolver News. However, there were a few websites that did refer to the “Meet Ray Epps” article, which basically proves that Revolver News is suppressed or censored.
DuckDuckGo with “fake-news filter” (see the Fake-News Filter topic) – Found “Meet Ray Epps” as the 15th search result.
Google – Reaches the end with a message: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 141 already displayed”. The Revolver News article was not found. Re-running this search to get all results still did not find the Revolver News article. However, the 60 Minutes puff-piece defending Ray Epps showed up several times.
Brave (using “News from the Right”) – Found “Meet Ray Epps Part 2” as the first result.
Mojeek – This UK search engine found the Revolver article as the first result.
Yandex – This Russian search engine found the Revolver article as the first result as well. Apparently, foreign search engines have not complied with the demands of the U.S. Government that Revolver News needs to be censored.
Test 2
In this test a simple search for “Donald Trump” was executed and the number of search results per news site were counted. We scrolled down over 400 entries before getting tired of scrolling or running out of results in Google. Below are the counts of the websites that showed up double-digit times. The results show the probability of finding anything but the big corporate left-leaning websites is close to zero. More/Less…
Following are the test results for Test 2 in various search engines:
DuckDuckGo - 319 out of 427 (75%) were from the following 9 big corporate left-leaning websites. The only right-leaning website to register with more than 1 search result was Fox News with 5 hits.
CNN 122
Ny Times 54
The Guardian 31
NBC News 30
Newsweek 22
NPR 17
Ap News 16
USA Today 14
Wash Post 13
Google - CNN was not quite as dominant as in DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia.org and trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov took 25 search results. Leaving those two out, 182 of 409 (45%) were from big corporate left-leaning websites. For right-leaning websites Fox News had 3 search results. The NY Post and Washington Examiner were represented 1 time each; the same number as Teen Vogue.
CNN 42
AP News 28
NBC News 20
NY Times 18
MSNBC 16
Wikipedia 14
ABC News 13
CBS News 13
BBC 11
Time 11
Trumpwhitehouse.Archives.Gov 11
Politico 10
Test 3
Two searches were performed on “Donald Trump corruption” and “Joe Biden corruption”. The hypothesis here is that the same big-corporate websites would lean heavily towards reporting on Trump corruption over Biden corruption. Conversely, the right-leaning websites would do the opposite. The results were exactly that. What is important to note though is that the right-leaning websites barely show up in these searches at all, so they are basically insignificant. This proves that not only will you get overwhelming search results from big-corporate left-leaning websites, but that they are much more interested in Trump corruption than Biden corruption. More/Less…
Following are the test results for Test 3 in various search engines:
DuckDuckGo – 378 search results were captured, sorted and counted to see which websites reported on Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden corruption. Of the websites that retuned more than 1 search result, 36 were biased towards Trump corruption vs. 11 that were biased towards Biden Corruption.
The following table are the websites that had counts slanted towards reporting Trump corruption. Also, consider that the counts for Biden corruption include many that are actually calling his corruption unfounded or conspiracy theory. Therefore, those results should actually be under the Trump column making the counts even more lopsided.
Site Trump Biden
NY Times 41 13
CNN 32 18
The Atlantic 21 1
Washington Post 17 6
The Guardian 17 5
NBC News 13 9
Newsweek 12 15
AP News 12 3
BBC 11 8
Vanity Fair 11 0
Politico 10 4
The following table are the websites that had counts slanted towards reporting Biden corruption. These results are overwhelmingly slanted towards only reporting Biden corruption. While this does show that right-leaning websites are much more likely to report Biden corruption, for the purpose of evaluating search engine bias vs. the bias of the website itself. For that consider the small number of right-leaning websites that show up at all. For the top right-leaning websites: NY Post, FOX News and Washington Examiner, a search result was not even found until the 24th, 37th and 104th search result respectively. So even when the right-leaning results are found, they are pushed down below the big corporate media results where they are unlikely to be found.
Site Trump Biden
NY Post 3 40
msn.com 2 40
Fox News 0 20
Yahoo 2 17
Real Clear Politics 3 14
Washington Examiner 1 10
DuckDuckGo with “fake-news filter” (see the Fake-News Filter topic) – Using this filter to eliminate the big-corporate left-leaning websites that overwhelm the search results found websites that went completely unrepresented in the non-filtered results. The following popular conservative websites showed up using the filter:
The Federalist
Breitbart News
Townhall
Newsmax
Western Journal
Judicial Watch
The Spectator
Daily Signal
PJ Media
Hot Air
Daily Wire
Just he News
The Federalist showed up an amazing 20 times where in the unfiltered search it didn’t show up at all. So, in order to slant the searches to the corporate giants, the important information from websites such as these are completely sent into a black hole.
Google – Google’s initial search has an algorithm that only allows each news site to appear a limited number of times in the search results. Therefore, without performing a second search, this test was only able to return the positions of the various websites in the search results. In both the Trump and Biden corruption searches the results were again highly skewed to the left-leaning websites. In the few that mentioned Biden corrupt, most were actually trying to debunk the corruption claims, not report on Biden’s corruption. Of the big-conservative websites the NY Post showed up at position 25 and Fox News at position 81. Again, this is far enough down that they are unlikely to be found, plus 2 results out of 140 just blend into the background.
Search Engine of Choice
The mojeek search engine out of the UK somehow manages to eliminate all, or almost all, American leftist corporate media from its results. It seems to remove just about all leftist propaganda and spin of any kind from its results. It passed the “Ray Epps test” (mentioned above) with flying colors. This makes it a great choice if you want to find alternative perspectives to the mainstream narrative. The only downside is there is no option to choose the “freshness” of the search results, so it returns a lot of old results.
Another great option is the Brave search engine using the “News from the Right” and “News from the Left” feature. This is under the “Goggles” option. Choosing “News from the Right” produces conservative news sites that are predominantly excluded from standard search results, similar to Mojeek, but with more established conservative sites represented and more up to date results. Choosing “News from the Left” you will get the inverse results, which pretty much line up with Google approved results.
Conclusion:
Whether you are using DuckDuckGo, Google or most any other popular search engines, the results will bubble the big-corporate left-leaning websites to the top. Without using a filter, most right-leaning websites will not even show up in the search results at all. Therefore, the only way to find independent sources of information is to use either the Mojeek or Brave search engines, the fake-news filter (see the Fake-News Filter topic) or go directly to the independent websites directly (see the topic on Suggested Independent News Sites). But keep in mind, that many of these independent websites do not have a robust search tool. This means that if you are needing to search for a particular topic, it may be difficult to find directly from the website.
Additional links:
Google exercises more direct control over search results than it has admitted, report claims
How Google manipulates search to favor liberals and tip elections
8 ways Google constantly invades your privacy — and how to fix it