Why Google Doesn't Rank Right-Wing Outlets Highly

Google does feature work by traditional media organizations more than insurgent conservative outlets. Of course, Google’s ability to divine “quality” as distinct from “popularity” is limited. Search-ranking technology relies on the implicit votes of readers, with all the human biases that come bundled with them. Google, for its part, categorically rejected the claim that it tinkered with search results for political reasons. “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,” a spokesperson said. “Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries.” There you have it: Google says it is optimizing for relevant answers and high-quality content, not “political ideology.” But—and this is the part Google won’t say—what if relevance and quality are not equally distributed across the media?

Of course the mainstream organizations—with larger staffs, generally better-trained journalists, and deeper roots in the field—would rank higher. The New York Times and Washington Post have thousands of journalists between them. In 2017, The Times’ subscription revenue broke a billion dollars. The institutions of modern conservative journalism are simply not staffed or funded at the same level as what gets called the mainstream media. Many right-wing outlets are embedded inside advocacy groups, like the Heritage Foundation’s The Daily Signal. Others are tiny blogs without the human resources to do original reporting.