FIRST ON FOX -- Google has featured Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign website in a more desirable location on its search engine results than former President Trump’s official site, according to a new study by the Media Research Center.
"Google is trying to stack the deck in favor of Kamala Harris," Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell told Fox News Digital.
"Google's search engine pushes left-wing media articles favoring Kamala Harris and slamming Donald Trump," he added. "Don't trust Google searches."
MRC Free Speech America researchers analyzed the Sept. 6 search results of two separate searches: "Donald Trump presidential race 2024" and "Kamala Harris presidential race 2024."
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The conservative media watchdog wanted to determine where Google Search would position each candidate’s presidential campaign website but found different results, which favored Harris.
"In the past, Google buried the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now the search giant very clearly pads its search results about political candidates with leftist legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favorable toward Democrats," MRC Free Speech America associate editor Gabriela Pariseau wrote when recapping the findings.
"Readers will have to sift through the biased news before they even see the organic results of their searches, let alone a candidate’s website," Pariseau continued.
When searching for "Donald Trump presidential race 2024," the former president's campaign website appeared sixth in Google search results.
"But before reaching Trump’s website, readers would see options to click on seven articles from left-wing sources. The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post were listed under the ‘Top Stories’ panel," Pariseau wrote.
"Once MRC researchers reached the actual search results, Google displayed a link to an article from The Economist titled ‘Donald Trump v Kamala Harris: who’s ahead in the polls?’ Additionally, the results showed CNN’s elections page along with a link to its live election updates. Google also displayed a link to NBC’s live election updates page," she added, noting that MRC NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham found "blatant leftist bias" in many articles suggested by Google.
However, when MRC Free Speech America researchers searched "Kamala Harris presidential race 2024," her campaign website was third in the organic Google search results. In addition, the articles that were suggested were largely from left-leaning outlets.
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"Nearly every article that appeared above Harris’s website in search results related to historian Allan Lichtman’s prediction that Harris will win the 2024 election," Pariseau wrote.
"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," Pariseau continued. "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."
A Google spokesperson dismissed the study.
"Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries. This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day over a month ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google," a Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
Some Google defenders have suggested that Trump’s campaign site shows up higher on Google Search than on other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo. Others have noted that the campaign website regularly lands as the top result when searching for simply "Donald Trump" on Google instead of "Donald Trump presidential race 2024."
MRC Free Speech America researchers also feel the placement of Trump and Harris’s websites is noteworthy. A 2023 study conducted by Search Engine Optimization expert Brian Dean found that the sixth result on search engines -- where Google placed Trump’s website -- typically receives just under half as many click-throughs as the third result, which is where Google placed Harris’ website.
"This comes after a previous MRC Free Speech America study that prompted Google with searches about Kamala Harris found that Google favored leftist media outlets at a rate of 17:2 in Google Search and 19:2 in the Google News tab across four queries," Pariseau wrote.
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The MRC told Fox News Digital it conducts Google searches "using a special algorithm to do searches as though they are being performed for the first time on what we call a ‘clean’ computer or phone with each new search."
The "clean" computer means that there is no prior search history or tracking cookies that can influence the results achieved when doing a search, as prior search history and tracking cookies impact search results. In addition, the MRC algorithm is not logged in to any accounts while performing a search.
