President Donald Trump has already attacked Amazon this year, falsely claiming that the company is ripping off the U. S. Post Office. The president’s animosity toward Amazon is based on unflattering items written about him in The Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Now, Mr. Trump’s attention has turned to Google and its search technology… President Donald Trump has already attacked Amazon
The president today sent out a tweet accusing Google of « rigging » its search results so that stories critical of Trump, which he calls « Fake News, » are prominently listed. In the tweet, Trump states that when searching for « Trump News, » 96% of the stories that appear are from what he calls the, « National Left-Wing Media. » What set off Trump this morning was a story from PJ Media titled « 96 Percent of Google Search Results for ‘Trump’ News Are from Liberal Media Outlets, » which was repeated on Fox News over the weekend.
At first, we decided to test this by punching « Trump News » into Google Search and the first story on top came from the only source of news that Trump likes, FOX News. However, we should point out that the story was not a positive one for the president. That was followed by reports from CNN, USA Today, Bloomberg, and ABC News. The problem here is that when you limit yourself to one media outlet and label the rest as « Fake News, » Google’s search results are going to seem skewed against you.
This morning, Google released a statement denying that it rigs search results for political purposes. The complete statement can be found below:
« When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds. Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology. Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment. »-Google
