Searching for "Is Kamala Harris a good Democratic candidate" yields a vivid image from Google. The search results are always changing, but last week the first link was a Pew Research Center poll showing
that "Harris energizes Democrats". The following links were similar, including an Associated Press article titled "Majority of Democrats think Kamala Harris would make a good president". However, if you've heard negative things about Harris, you could question whether she's a "bad" Democratic candidate. Fundamentally, the question is the same, but Google's results are far more depressing."It's been easy to forget how bad Kamala Harris is," read the top-ranked Reason Magazine article.
The US News & World Report then gave Harris a positive spin, declaring that he is not "the worst thing that could happen to America," but the subsequent outcomes have all been scathing. Al Jazeera published a post explaining "Why I am not voting for Kamala Harris," which was followed by an unending Reddit discussion about why she is not good. The same contrast exists in queries about Donald Trump, conspiracy theories, controversial political arguments, and even medical knowledge. Some experts believe Google is simply reflecting your own beliefs back to you. It may exacerbate your personal biases and widen societal divides along the way.
The Bias Machine
"Google wants to give people what they want, but sometimes that information isn't the most useful," says Sarah Presch, director of digital marketing at Dragon Metrics, a platform that helps companies optimize their websites for Google recognition through "search engine optimization" or SEO techniques. It's a profession that necessitates methodically reviewing Google results, and a few years ago, Presch noticed a problem. "I started looking at how Google handles topics where there's heated debate," she says. "In a lot of cases, the results were shocking."
Some of the more remarkable examples revolved around how Google handles specific health requests. Google frequently takes content from the web and puts it at the top of search results as a Featured Snippet, which provides a short answer. Presch researched the "link between coffee and hypertension". The Featured Snippet cited a Mayo Clinic report, stressing the sentence "Caffeine may cause a short, but dramatic increase in your blood pressure." However when she searched for "no link between coffee and hypertension," the Featured Snippet referred to a different sentence from the same Mayo Clinic article: "Caffeine does not have a long-term effect on blood pressure and is not linked with a higher risk of high blood pressure."
.jpg)
