Google’s Search Bias and Fake News
As fake news has become an ever-increasing problem in our society, many people have started to put some of the blame on organizations such as Facebook and Google for allowing the fake news to be available to a wider audience. For instance, Google’s autocomplete function often offers suggestions tied to fake news stories, and its search algorithm often results in fake or highly biased news articles appearing on the first page of Google search results. The factors that go into Google’s search algorithm, such as the number of websites that link to a page, what those websites are, the number of people who visit a page, and how frequently a page is updated, tend to favor extremely slanted news sources. In addition, there are people who are using tricks to fool Google’s search algorithm into placing fake news stories higher up on a list of search results. Overall, most people are unaware of the bias that can often show up in their search results or autocomplete on Google, and many people are unaware of the effect it could have on their political beliefs.
This ties in closely with the concepts of Page Rank and hub and authority scores. Although there are many factors that go into Google’s search algorithm, typically search results for news articles suggest pages with high authority scores. However, it is possible to increase a page’s normalized authority score by creating other webpages that link to pages with high authority scores as well as the page that you are wishing to increase the authority score to (essentially, you want to increase the hub score of the other webpages that you create). Many people who want their webpages to be seen rely on this sort of behavior to promote their page, however it can be easily abused by those wishing to spread fake news. In addition, Google also relies on popularity as a sign that something should be ranked differently than it is. So somebody wishing to spread a fake news story can just ask a bunch of people to start viewing it in order to raise its position in the search results. Once an article ends up as one of the first few results, it will probably stay there, since people are more likely to click on an earlier result than a later one. This can also be seen in Google’s autocomplete function, where those with heavily slanted viewpoints have frequently used certain expressions to the point where they have become popular suggestions for autocomplete.