Published , by Charles Singletary Jr
Published , by Charles Singletary Jr
Larry Kudlow, the economic adviser to President Donald Trump, revealed today that the Trump administration is "taking a look" at regulating the Google search engine. The catalyst for the series of questions that led to this revelation was Trump's early-morning Tweets where he complained about the search results for "Trump News."
Trump continues by stating that "Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good." The Washington Post reported the comments from Kudlow and got this statement from Google in response to Trump's tweets:
“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."
“Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
The report points out that Google search results are affected by personal search history, but the conversation about this alone is worrying. Paula Bolyard, the supervising editor of a conservative publication, claims she searched "Trump" on Google News and found that 96% percent of the results were left-leaning. She acknowledged that her method wasn't scientific.