Google Proven To Manipulate Search Results With 'Blacklists'

Google Lied: Its Search Blacklists Are Manually Reviewed After All, Docs Show

Despite protestations to the contrary, Google does, in fact, manually prune your search results, according to a new report.

Google says it maintains its powerful blacklists exist to protect users from falsehoods; however, those lists and the searches they help govern aren't purely algorithm-driven, as company leaders have often claimed. Documents obtained by the Daily Caller prove that the company's blacklists have a manual review tool, where humans directly make decisions about what will or will not appear in search results.

Dr. Robert Epstein, the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, told Sputnik Tuesday the revelations prove just how deceptive the language of Google officials about the company's practices can be.

"The main thing that the new leak tells us is exactly how Google refers to that blacklist internally — as either the ‘XPA news blacklist' or the ‘deceptive_news domain blacklist.' It also gives us a look at the latest procedure the company uses to add items to this blacklist," Epstein said.

"The new leak also provides further evidence that Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, lied to Congress a few months ago when he denied that Google makes manual adjustments to the content the company shows people," he said.

"There's another takeaway here too: When Google officials deny making manual adjustments by using language like, ‘we don't alter our algorithms to favor one political party or another,' they are engaging in deceptive misdirection. They don't need to adjust their ‘algorithms,' since their algorithms are always checking blacklists. They simply need to add words, phrases, or domain names to one or more blacklists."

"The purpose of the blacklist will be to bar the sites from surfacing in any Search feature or news product. It will not cause a demotion in the organic search results or de-index them altogether," reads the policy document obtained by the Caller.

Google's been caught red-handed being politically biased in its search results.

Epstein wrote a groundbreaking paper in 2015 about the search engine manipulation effect, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. In it, he proved Google's ability to "shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more — up to 80 percent in some demographic groups — with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated," Epstein wrote in Politico at the time.

Further, Epstein's research shows that Google manipulated search results to display pro-Hillary Clinton results higher on the page than others. It's interesting to note that 95 percent of campaign contributions made by Google employees go to Democrats, according to the researcher.