Search Engine Bias

It's not just a social media problem – how search engines spread misinformationSearch engines, like social media algorithms, get you to click on links by learning what other people click on. Enticing misinformation often comes out on top.

Google

This article discusses at length the ways in which SEO works and why Google’s results are still in fact still the best even though those results naturally favor more liberally biased sources. It has to do with far-right sites often not having very strong referenced/referencing links & sources.

Bing

From personal experience so far Bing is giving me more far right website results when I search for specifically right wing terms such as “election fraud”, “climate change hoax”, “COVID hoax”. Whereas Google mostly turns up results that debunk those subjects.

Another experiment I conducted was to find a super small and obscure website and copy a string of text from it and then search for that string in Google and in Bing. Bing is consistently turning up more accurate results. I think this again has to do with how Google favors more powerfully sourced/referenced websites. It makes sense that it will rank a tiny unknown site very low in its results and instead try to give you results that match the subjects listed in your string of text as opposed to finding that specific string of text itself.

SearX & SearXNG

An alternative to Google or Bing would be to use SearX. Users can run private instances of SearX on their own computer, but there are also many public, user-run, SearX instances. Across all categories, SearX can fetch search results from about 82 different engines. This includes major search engines and site-specific searches like Bing, Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Yandex. It is a free and open-source metasearch engine, available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, with the aim of protecting the privacy of its users.