Ramon Tomey

Search engine giant Google appears to be rigging its search results related to the midterm elections to favor Democratic Party candidates.

Conservative watchdog Media Research Center (MRC) put forward this claim in an Oct. 25 piece published on its website. It searched for the campaign websites of Republican and Democratic candidates for 12 key Senate races using Google, Microsoft-owned Bing and DuckDuckGo and looked at the search results. MRC then looked at the organic search results on the first page, where it discovered the Big Tech firm's clear bias against GOP candidates.

The group found that out of 12 senatorial races, the campaign websites for GOP candidates were displayed at a lower rank in organic search results. Some GOP candidates who found their websites at the bottom of search results were Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt at No. 27 and incumbent Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson – who is seeking re-election – at No. 13. In contrast, senatorial candidates from the Democratic Party appeared higher in organic search results.

Moreover, MRC also discovered that the campaign websites of seven GOP senatorial candidates did not even show up on the first five organic search results:

• Sen. Marco Rubio (Florida)
• Herschel Walker (Georgia)
• Adam Laxalt (Nevada)
• Don Bolduc (New Hampshire)
• Rep. Ted Budd (North Carolina)
• J.D. Vance (Ohio)
• Dr. Mehmet Oz (Pennsylvania)

In contrast, campaign websites for some Democratic senatorial candidates appeared in the first 10 organic search results:

• Rep. Val Demmings (Florida) – No. 6
• Sen. Raphael Warnock (Georgia) – No. 5
• Sen. Maggie Hassan (New Hampshire) – No. 8
• Cheri Beasley (North Carolina) – No. 1
• Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio) – No. 2
• Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) – No. 3
• Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (Wisconsin) – No. 5

The conservative media watchdog’s findings came amid an earlier study by North Carolina State University researchers, which found that Google’s Gmail marked 59.3 percent more emails from right-leaning candidates as spam compared to left-leaning candidates. (Related: ‘Manipulating the data’: MRC’s Brent Bozell highlights Google search’s pro-Democrat election bias.)

Google vehemently denies anti-GOP bias, search result manipulation

L. Brent Bozell, MRC’s founder and president, put in his two cents on the report.

“Google must be investigated for its un-American efforts to sway the election,” he said. “First, researchers caught Google red-handed by proving GOP campaign emails were sent to spam. Now, we’ve uncovered Google manipulating search results to hide GOP campaign websites while promoting Democratic ones.”

Bozell ultimately branded this search result manipulation as “an effort by Google to help Democrats and interfere in the Democratic process.”