A new research report written by mathematician and DefyCCC editor, Leo Goldstein, alleged that Google's search function is biased against conservative news sites, and specifically notes that the topics of climate change and general politics are impacted as a result.

Goldstein's findings

According to Goldstein's report, which was based on research conducted through Alexa:

• Google's search functionality "is found to be biased in favor of left/liberal domains," and "against conservative domains" with what he calls a confidence of 95 percent.
• The percentage of "hard-left" domain traffic which are referred to websites by Google Search are heavily disproportionate to that of more conservative-leaning websites
• There appears to be evidence that "hard-left" domains have been "hand-picked" for prominent placement

Other incidents of possible censorship

• In July, a pro-life group alleged that Google removed their site from top search results, and claimed that they had been "singled out" for "discrimination.
• August saw a former Google engineer at odds with the company who alleged that he was fired over his conservative views. The former employee penned a missive disagreeing with a politically correct company policy that was said to be a push for "diversity" within the company.

Google's stance

In what the company called a tactic to crack down on "unsupported conspiracy theories" showing up in search queries, Google in April announced that by integrating new algorithms into its search feature, they hoped to reduce "misleading information."

Google added that they would have real-life "evaluators" on staff to analyze and monitor Google's organic search results.

The company said that evaluators were provided with guidelines to follow in order to "appropriately flag" content that could be deemed "misleading" and "offensive," as well as content believed to be "hoaxes."

Google said that the new guidelines would enable search algorithms to assist in demoting what they considered to be "low-quality content."