Google is at it again, forcing users to dig through 13 pages of search results before finally finding a story by Fox News in one search, and 14 pages before finding a story by the New York Post in another. These two results were the first U.S.-based right-of-center publications in two separate searches using the leftist search platform. Is Google living up to former President Donald Trump’s accusations of election interference?
Using the media list provided by AllSides that classifies publications based on their “right” to “left” bias, MRC researchers found that tech giant Google blanketed search results for “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and “donald trump presidential race 2024” with leftist, legacy media sources like CNN, The New York Times, NBC News and Politico. On Oct. 1, MRC researchers did not find any U.S.-based “lean-right” media outlets until Fox News appeared as the fifth result on the 13th page of Google search results for the aforementioned Harris search prompt. Likewise, Google buried the first U.S.-based “lean right” result for the aforementioned Trump prompt as the third result on the 14th page, as Google featured an article by the New York Post.
This overt leftist bias is especially concerning considering that according to a November 2023 Pew Research survey, a rising number of American adults receive their news from search. The study found that 15 percent of U.S. adults prefer to get their news from search engines which is up from 13 percent in 2022 and 11 percent in 2021.
Equally concerning, the Google search results are not only filled with radical leftist websites such as Vox and Al Jazeera, but also include publications owned and supported by wealthy Democrats. Billionaire and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post. SalesForce CEO and longtime Harris donor Marc Benioff owns Time magazine. FactCheck.org—a member of the George Soros-funded Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network—appeared before any U.S.-based sources on the right, as determined by AllSides.
Google did display a U.K.-based “lean right” website earlier in its results. However, the search giant even buried the U.K.-based outlet The Telegraph on the 10th page of the Harris prompt search results and on the seventh page of the Trump prompt search results.
An earlier MRC study showed extraordinary bias in Google search results, revealing that the search engine had forced users trying to find the Trump campaign’s website to wade through a gauntlet of leftist articles before reaching it. Following the MRC study, Trump condemned Google’s behavior in a post on Truth Social, vowing legal action in a potential second administration. Google, on the other hand, absurdly tried to dismiss the study.
Now MRC has caught them again, but Google has a long record of bias and election interference dating back to 2008.
Before Google began making users run the gauntlet of negative coverage to see the Trump campaign’s website, the search engine frequently buried the former president so far down that it did not appear on the first page of results. Google did this during the Republican National Convention and ahead of the July presidential debate between Trump and Biden. Google also did this while Trump was in the news due to a guilty verdict following Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s politicized prosecution of him.
This is just one of a myriad of ways that Google has interfered in American elections on behalf of its favored candidates. In fact, Google meddled in American elections no fewer than 41 times from 2008 to 2024, including by burying 83 percent of the Republican campaign websites for the most competitive Senate races of 2022.
Methodology
For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Oct. 1 Google search results of the innocuous words “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” MRC Free Speech America utilized a VPN and private window utilizing the Brave privacy browser to analyze Google search results to limit the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies. MRC Free Speech America also utilized the AllSides media bias chart as a gauge to determine which outlets are “right” and “lean right.” AllSides notes it has a “patent on rating bias and use[s] multiple methodologies,” not a homogenous group or an algorithm. “Our methods are: Blind Bias Surveys of Americans, Editorial Reviews by a multipartisan team of panelists who look for common types of media bias, independent reviews, and third party data.”
Readers should be aware that this report only uses the AllSides list to analyze ratings of outlets considered by AllSides to be “right” and “lean right” and does not necessarily reflect MRC’s characterizations of these outlets.
Editor’s Note: Assistant Editor Gabriela Pariseau contributed to this report.
