Google placed search results for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign website more prominently than Republican rival Donald Trump’s official site — and buried the result for the GOP candidate under “left-biased” content. according to a new study.
The Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog, found the disparity after analyzing search results for two separate queries — “Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential race” and “Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential race.”
The search by MRC Free Speech America researchers for the Harris campaign, conducted on September 6, returned a result that was the third – below the articles about the Vice President suggested by mainly left-wing media such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico that favor Harris.
The same question about Trump appeared in sixth place on the first page of results, under content critical of the former president from the same media outlets — with no results for conservative publications like the New York Post.
“Google is trying to decide in favor of Kamala Harris,” Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell told Fox News Digital.
“Google’s search engine pushes left-wing media articles favoring Kamala Harris and bashing Donald Trump. Don’t trust Google searches.”
The study to determine where Google would position each candidate’s presidential campaign website further fueled criticism of the tech giant’s perceived left-wing bias. Last month, the company came under fire for alleged anomalies in search results related to Trump’s candidacy, as well as the omission of the former president’s assassination by its AutoCorrect feature.
“In the past, Google buried Republican candidates’ campaign websites. Now the search giant very clearly fills search results for political candidates with left-wing heritage news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favorable to Democrats,” MRC Free Speech America editor Gabriela Pariseau wrote when summarize the findings.
“Readers will have to sift through biased news before they even see the organic results of their searches, let alone a candidate’s website.”
Tim Graham, executive editor of MRC NewsBusters, added that the search results provided links to articles from CNN, NBC and other outlets with a “blatant leftist bias”.
An analysis of the same search terms conducted by The Post on Thursday found that results for Trump’s campaign website appeared at the bottom of the front page under “Sponsored Posts” — behind a host of content from left-leaning sites.
The score for Harris’ site was higher on the site, but not as high as MRC’s analysis, with articles from the Times, CNN and NBC. There were no articles from The Post or The Wall Street Journal.
“Almost every article that appeared on Harris’ website in search results related to historian Allan Lichtman’s prediction that Harris will win the 2024 election,” Pariseau wrote, referring to the MRC study.
“This overt leftist bias is especially troubling given that according to a November 2023 Pew Research poll, a growing number of American adults get their news from research.”
The MRC study found that 15% of US adults prefer to get their news from search engines, up from 13% in 2022 and 11% in 2021.
The placement of the Trump and Harris websites is particularly important, Pariseau says. A 2023 study conducted by Search Engine Optimization expert Brian Dean found that the sixth result on search engines typically gets just under half as many clicks as the third result, according to Fox digital.
“This comes after an earlier study by MRC Free Speech America that pushed Google with searches about Kamala Harris found that Google favored left-wing media by a ratio of 17:2 on Google Search and 19:2 on the Google News tab across four questions . wrote Pariseau.
A Google spokesperson dismissed the study.
“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries. This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites were ranked in the top results on Google,” the representative told Fox News Digital.
The Post contacted Google for comment.
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