My next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the political role of search engines. During the 2024 US election, Donald Trump claimed that Google search engines and autocomplete search recommendations were favouring Kamala Harris; but we know far too little still on how search engines select their search results, and what effects these may have on their users’ information environments.
This particular paper explores how algorithmically selected information might affect users; this is also dependent on how users formulate their search queries, of course, and so any analysis of this also needs to explore queries which represent different ideological slants. Localisation of search results, and their changes over time, also need to be tested.
This project conducted a virtual agent-based audit of search results from Google and Bing, monthly from June to October and daily from 23 October to 10 November 2024. It used several US locations and 60-120 virtual agents, and searched for neutral, Republican, and Democratic topics (mainly politicians’ names).
This produced some 305,000 search results, labelled as journalistic, government, social media, candidate, NGO, blogs, and encyclopaedia content. Journalistic sources were prominent, but more so for Republican than Democrat queries; their prevalence fluctuated somewhat over time.
Left-leaning sources were prominent for Democrat and neutral queries; right-leaning sources for Republican queries. Left-leaning sources were prominent in both organic queries and the news block on Google, as well as in Bing, right-leaning sources were less visible in the Google news block. Such patterns were largely consistent over time.
Left-leaning media are therefore prioritised overall, but this might not necessarily result in a negative representation of right-wing candidates. The slant of queries aligns with the slant of results, and user-side factors like query formulation have more impact on results than system-side factors, with the exception of Google’s news block.
Of course, equal representation of all ideological perspectives is not necessarily desirable here; we must also discuss what kind of diversity in search results is good for democracy.
