Search engine giant Google claims that it doesn't skew search results in any particular political direction, and that its entire platform is completely neutral when it comes to pulling up information for users. But is this actually true?
Jim Stroud from The Jim Stroud Show said that Google is lying about being non-partisan during a recent episode of his show, available for viewing Brighteon.com.
While there are some good uses for Google, when it comes to politics, the company of "do no evil" is about as left-leaning as they come – which is why Stroud ultimately decided to ditch the Google platform entirely and switch to DuckDuckGo instead.
"By relying on Google to be a non-partial arbiter of information, I place them in this authoritarian position to guide my views and opinions," Stroud states.
"If you search for the word 'platform,' and I search for the word 'platform,' we may get different results because Google takes into account our various search histories, our social media connections, our locations, and so forth, because Google wants to give you the best results – and more often than not, those results tend to be personalized. With that being said, Google has been known to 'cook the books' from time to time."
Be sure to watch this full segment of The Jim Stroud Show at Brighteon.com below:
Most Google search results support liberal candidates and left-leaning social positions
Stroud shows a clip of Jay Strubberg from Newsy explaining the obvious variances in search results on Google for political candidates, for instance, using an outside analysis as evidence of foul play.
"When it comes to political candidates and issues, a new study claims Google gives more liberal-leaning search results," Strubberg explains. "Analysis by CanIRank.com found Google's top search result pages were 40 percent more likely to have a left or far-left slant."
"The study searched for 50 politically-themed key words or phrases, and some of the results are what you would expect. 'Minimum wage' tended to yield more liberal results, while 'does gun control reduce crime?' resulted in more conservative ones. Searchers for 'financial regulation' and 'federal reserve' found mostly non-partisan links."
Using the political opinions of four different people to further hone down Google's skewed algorithms, CanIRank.com found that 16 percent of political search terms pulled up no right-leaning results at all – which the site declared to be potentially problematic for "democracy."
"Another study by The University of Maryland found Google searches for Democratic presidential candidates led to more supportive websites than searches for Republican candidates," Strubberg adds.
Stroud searches for 'idiot' images on four major search engines; only Google pulled up almost all pictures of President Trump
Stroud himself decided to conduct his own experiment using the search term "idiot" to see what various popular search engines pull up in their image sections. Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo all pulled up a variety of images, while Google was the only one to pull up, almost exclusively, pictures of President Trump, his sons, and other Trump-related imagery.
Stroud then initiated searches for "hillary clinton is" to see how each of these same search engines auto-filled in the rest. Yahoo completed the sentence with words like "a witch" or "a criminal," as did DuckDuckGo. Bing pulled up mostly negative with a few positive sentence completions, while Google, as to be expected, pulled up only positive fill-ins like "a democrat" and even "is president" – even though Hillary Clinton never has been, and never will be, president of the United States.
"This is why I switched the default search settings on my browser to DuckDuckGo," Stroud concludes.
"I want to form my own opinion about controversial topics from a variety of sources, not just select sources designed to steer me in a certain direction. I want what I thought Google was giving me."
Be sure to watch his full segment at Brighteon.com
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