If a person, by any chance, searched the words “Donald Trump” and “Reddit” together on a number of internet search engines, such as Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, he or she would find that the top spot in the results is occupied by r/The_Donald—likely the largest and most active fan club for President Donald Trump on the internet.
Making the same search on Google, however, yielded no such result when repeatedly tried by The Epoch Times staff on April 12. Not on the first page of the results, not on the second, not on the 10th.
Other users concurred, reporting that Google returned the same result, or lack thereof, for them too.
The Epoch Times conducted a series of tests on March 25, March 26, and April 12 using multiple web browsers in public and private modes, logged in or not—with the same lack of r/The_Donald in the Google results for a plethora of phrases, like “Donald Trump Reddit” and “Reddit The Donald Trump” and even “Reddit The Donald.”
Google search results for the words “donald trump reddit” as shown on March 25, 2019. (Screenshot via Google)
Other search engines consistently showed the page at the top of the results.
The Epoch Times wasn’t able to confirm whether the Reddit page previously surfaced as one of Google’s top results.
A Google official, commenting on the condition of anonymity, denied the company took any action to impact the ranking of the page and said Google didn’t remove it from its page index. The page still appears high in the results, the official said via email, when one looks for it more specifically, such as by searching “The_Donald” or “/r/The_Donald” or “reddit The_Donald.”
‘Fringe Ranking’
One possible explanation came in an April 9 report by The Daily Caller, which cited internal Google documents as saying that the company has something called “fringe ranking: not showing fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, or science/medical/history denial unless we’re sure that’s what the user wants.”Google didn’t respond to questions on whether the “fringe ranking” applies to r/The_Donald. Left-leaning press has, however, repeatedly accused the page’s users of being hateful.
Bias Accusations
Google and other tech companies including Facebook and Twitter have been consistently accused of bias against right-leaning content. The companies have denied political bias, but a growing stack of evidence shows they may have been applying their “hate speech” and other policies unevenly, perhaps without being aware of doing so.Journalist and commentator Tim Pool suggested having a “hate speech” policy reflect a left-leaning bias to begin with.
Blacklist
Internal Google materials leaked to media have indicated the company manually tweaks search results on topics it deems “controversial” and maintains a blacklist for pages that violate its “misrepresentation” and “good neighbor” policies. Such pages then don’t show in the News and other infoboxes on the search result pages, The Daily Caller reported.The leaked materials appear to contradict the Dec. 11 congressional testimony of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who said the company doesn’t “manually intervene on any particular search result.”
“We do not manually determine the order of any search result, nor do our algorithms or policies attempt to make any judgment on the political leanings of a website,” a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement in response to The Daily Caller report.
