I'm sure everyone is familiar with Google. It would be very difficult to find someone that hasn't used Google to search for something on the internet. It has become so dominant in internet search that the name Google has become synonimous with search. Everyone has heard someone say I'm going to "google it on the web". My question is whether when "googling" something your getting the whole story.
I have a few websites which are mostly ecommerce sites so I'm ever concerned with something called "search engine ranking". In the simplest terms it is a rating of importance placed on web pages for individual search terms. Search engines will usually display search results in the order of their search engine page ranking in an attempt to first display the most relevant content responding to the specific search query. That's the way it's supposed to work in theory, but what if the search engine were to inject a human opinion about relevance based on ideology, or profitability?
I'm sure many if not most are familiar with the google toolbar. It has only one feature on it that I use. That is the page rank feature. It will display the "Google page ranking" for any page you navigate too that is indexed by Google. While browsing the web I have taken notice of page rankings of many of the sites I visit. In general when viewing prominent news sites both liberal and conservative there is a consistent trend that can be observed. Conservative sites consistently rank lower than liberal. For example the Huffington Post home page ranks 8 out of a possible 10. The Blaze ranks 7. Fox news home page ranks 7 while MSNBC ranks 8. Media Matters ranks 8 while Heritage. org ranks 7. These are all high profile sites that Have to be ranked high, and somewhat equally, but the ever slight disparage of conservative news is becoming evident to me. That is just the tip of the iceberg.
When looking at social sites it's quite obvious. Facebook for example has a ranking of 10 out of 10 for every single page I have ever visited. Great! Facebook is just that important to everyone on the internet? The disparage comes when you compare Facebook to say FreedomTorch. You see FreedomTorch has a ranking of 0 out of 10 for every single page. How is it possible that every single idiotic page on Facebook is more important than any page on FreedomTorch? Even blogs written by some pretty good talent here are ranked 0. Yes, Google is just an unbiased search engine only looking to serve the most relevant content to it's users.
I think not!
