Monday, April 30, 2007

The Politics of Google

Could our favorite search engine be a closet conservative?

Recent lookups raise the question. A query of “sen durbin news” returned a featured item from Fox News and five of the next six hits from the Washington Times and Fox.

For “george tenet news,” the top citation and the third were both from Fox.

Two examples don’t add up to a pattern, but as a user unschooled in Google arcana, just asking.

2 comments:

mistformsquirrel said...

Just FYI - I don't think you've anything to worry there. Google is, if I under stand right, designed to link people based on number of hits/popularity of a given website.

Much to our chagrin - Fox remains fairly high on the hog; because its the prime source for the 30% who still believe in W and Iraq. So if one in three people go to Fox News' website - it's no surprise that Google brings them up regularly. I doubt its got anything to do with Google's politics.

Jon Swift said...

Perhaps this has something to do with a phenomenon I wrote about here. Conservative blogs are a lot smarter about linking to each other which raises their page rank in Google. Those blogs tend to link more to conservative news sites. Because they have higher page rank, their links matter more. Unfortunately, many liberal blogs just don't get it, although you can see from the updates on my post that many are catching on.