Is Google Search really Biased against Donald Trump?

I updated my experiment from four years ago, and was surprised by the search results.

So, as I have seen in the past, Google searches used to be biased, not offering their users clear-cut, middle-of-the-road search results. I’m not talking about sponsored ads that show up in results or about companies gaming the algorithmic system through the latest SEO tech so their site shows up on the first page of searches for whatever subject they are pushing.

I am talking about a biased algorithm in favor of one thing or one person over another. I thought we would conduct this experiment again this election season to see if things have improved over at Google, since Elon Musk recently caused a stir in this realm. Spoiler alert: Google has improved dramatically from my last experiment four years ago. While I did replicate Musk’s search example of Donald Trump, this likely was not done on a clean machine as I could only replicate it on a computer that was muddled with my past search history and full cache, etc.

For the following, I am using an “empty computer” running on Google Chrome to go to Google’s search engine (cleared cache), and third-party cookies are blocked, etc. One thing to understand when searching on Google and other search engines is they could be taking into account your past search history, perhaps cookies and memory residing on your local machine. In this experiment, none of those exist. So, let’s go…

We start with the presidential race—our first search of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Chase Oliver. We check the “autofill” of suggested search terms and find nothing that raises any issues, from my point of view, outside of no suggestions for Chase Oliver.

Now, here are the screenshots of unbiased search results for the top three candidates.

While there are a couple of minor differences in the searches, the format and informational access to information about each are unbiased, in my opinion.

I experimented further with the fresh local machine, now with just these few searches, and the “autofill” search suggestions from earlier changed dramatically, but again, nothing nefarious. Take look:

Again, while many want to hate on Google, I see nothing nefarious from my experiment.