Google CEO Sundar Pichai at World Internet Conference in China Dec. 3, 2017. The conference aimed to promote China’s vision for the internet — state censorship (Justin Sullivan-Getty Images)
Many readers have doubtless noticed bias in results returned by Google’s search engine when the topic is political. Today our editor decided to do a controlled experiment. He entered the following search string in each of the leading search engines:
China “Cold War” “trade war” Founders
By the very specific nature of the search string, an unbiased search engine would have brought up Founders Broadsheet‘s penultimate blog on the first results page. Here is what happened:
Safari: first page, first item
DuckDuckGo: first page, first item
Bing: first page, second item
Yahoo: first page, sixth item
Google: nowhere to be found in pages one through seven (at which point the editor gave up looking).
In Founders Broadsheet‘s case, Google isn’t even bothering to relegate it to a later results page. It’s suppressing us altogether. Was this Google’s own doing, or was it on China’s request?
Doubtless there are many other Google-disapproved news sources that are similarly suppressed, whether for the sake of “China’s vision for the internet” or Google’s love of Progressivism . Happily there are alternative search engines. We urge our readers to switch to one or more of these.
Click here to go to the previous Founders Broadsheet post (“First trade talks with China fail; Cold War the new reality”)
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