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Google placed search results for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ campaign website in a more prominent location than the official site for Republican rival Donald Trump — and buried the result for the GOP candidate under content with “leftist bias,” according to a new study.
Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog, found the disparity after analyzing search results of two separate queries — “Donald Trump presidential race 2024” and “Kamala Harris presidential race 2024.”
The search by MRC Free Speech America researchers for Harris’ campaign, conducted Sept. 6, yielded a result that was third — below articles about the Vice President suggested largely from left-leaning outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post and Politico that favor Harris.
The same query for Trump turned up in the sixth spot on the first result page, beneath critical content about the former president from the same outlets — with no results for conservative publications like the New York Post.
“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. Don’t trust Google searches.”
The study to determine where Google would position each candidate’s presidential campaign website further fueled criticism of the tech giant’s perceived left-wing bias. Last month, the company was slammed for allegedly skewing search results related to Trump’s candidacy as well as omitting the assassination attempt on the former president from its AutoCorrect function.
“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.”
Tim Graham, executive editor of MRC NewsBusters, added that search results yielded links to articles by CNN, NBC and other outlets with a “blatant leftist bias.”
An analysis of the same search terms conducted by The Post on Thursday found that results for Trump’s campaign website appeared at the bottom of the first page under “Sponsored Posts” — after a slew of content from left-leaning sites.
The result for Harris’ site was higher on the page but not as high as MRC’s analysis, with articles from the Times, CNN and NBC. There were no articles from The Post or The Wall Street Journal.
“Nearly every article that appeared above Harris’ website in search results related to historian Allan Lichtman’s prediction that Harris will win the 2024 election,” Pariseau wrote in reference to the MRC study.
“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.”
The MRC study found that 15% of US adults prefer to get their news from search engines, up from 13% in 2022 and 11% in 2021.
The placement of Trump and Harris’s websites is especially noteworthy, Pariseau contends. A 2023 study conducted by Search Engine Optimization expert Brian Dean found that the sixth result on search engines typically receives just under half as many click-throughs as the third result, according to Fox digital.
“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.
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 several weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google,” the rep told Fox News Digital.
The Post reached out to Google for comment.
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