- The Wall Street Journal claims Google has been blacklisting sites
- It also claims that conservative publications have been blacklisted
- The WSJ claims that Google made algorithmic changes in favour big businesses over smaller ones including on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay
- They claim the blacklist policy instructs engineers, known as ‘maintainers’, to focus on sites that actively aim to mislead
- A Google spokesperson said the company does ‘not manually determine the order of any search result’
Google is secretly blacklisting certain sites to prevent them appearing in search results – despite publicly denying doing so – according to an investigation.
The Wall Street Journal report claims that the search giant has been blacklisting certain spam sites since the early 2000s, as well as those featuring child abuse or copyright infringement, to prevent them appearing in search results.
The newspaper also reported that conservative publications have been blacklisted in Google News, and said that it had seen documents to support this claim, fuelling cries of political bias.
Right-wing websites The Gateway Pundit and The United West included on a list of hundreds of websites that wouldn’t appear in Google News or featured products – although they could appear in organic search results, it said.
The WSJ compared Duckduckgo (right) and Google (left) autocomplete results in Joe Biden and other terms. They found when researching for Joe Biden ‘creepy’ was suggested every time by the former but never by Google
A Google spokesperson said the company does ‘not manually determine the order of any search result.’
However, she said sites that don’t adhere to Google News ‘inclusion policies’ are ‘not eligible to appear on news surfaces or in information boxes in Search.’
Google has said repeatedly it doesn’t make decisions based on politics, and has previously said in congressional testimony that it doesn’t use blacklists. And former employees claim there is no political bias involved in decisions.
In a 2018 hearing whether the company had ever blacklisted a ‘company, group, individual or outlet…for political reasons,’ Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of public policy, responded: ‘No, ma’am, we don’t use blacklists/whitelists to influence our search results,’ according to the transcript.
Responding to the WSJ report, a Google spokesperson told Mail Online: ‘This article contains a number of old, incomplete anecdotes, many of which not only predated our current processes and policies but also give a very inaccurate impression of how we approach building and improving Search.’
Google reportedly manipulates search results to hide controversial subjects and favor big business