Google favours left-leaning, study says

The most popular and powerful search engine in the world may be playing favourites.

A new report says Google tends to feature only a handful of news outlets with a left-leaning audience in their Top Stories box — a spot in search results every newsroom is clawing for.

The study shows articles from publications with leftwing readers get about five times as many views as those with a right-leaning readership.

The researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois used data from 2017 to test 30 articles for a month, collecting more than 6,300 links.

CNN, The New York Times and Washington Post dominate the section, having their name on almost one in four of all Top Stories. Meanwhile, Fox News articles showed up in three per cent of searches.

“Google Top Stories box impressions tend to have a more left-leaning than right-leaning inclination,” researchers Daniel Trielli and Nicholas Diakopoulos wrote.

Their audit showed outlets with a left-wing audience had 62.4 per cent of all article views compared with 11.3 per cent from the right. When accounting for stories that weren’t rated as having right or left readers, the researchers say the trend is still clear.

The monopolization also became more apparent with certain searches. CNN and The New York Times racked up three of four article views in a search for “rex tillerson.”

So does Google like the political left more than the right? Not quite.

“The underlying issue in source diversity appears to hinge on a greater availability of news material on the left,” wrote Trielli and Diakopoulos.

One factor that influences the search engine’s algorithm is how often a newsroom produces content. If an outlet publishes more stories at a faster rate, Google’s algorithm takes notice.

Newsrooms with left-wing readers produce twice as many stories as their counterparts, but Google seems to exaggerate the difference to three times, which means those articles end up in the Top Stories box more often.

Outlets with more of those Top Stories views get more website traffic. A rough estimate shows CNN enjoys a 24 per cent bump in website visitors compared with NPR, which sees just under four per cent.

Trielli and Diakopoulos can’t determine why only a few outlets have a stranglehold on results. In their report, they say it could just be a matter of having a higher search ranking by the algorithm or simply being better at getting content noticed.