President-elect Donald Trump may have overcome Google’s election interference, but the search giant continues to rig presidential race search results. 

The Media Research Center found that Google provided a desert of left and legacy media sources for conservatives to wander through in search of right-of-center presidential race coverage on Nov. 12—exactly one week after the election. MRC researchers once again utilized the media list provided by AllSides, which classifies publications based on their “right” to “left” bias, and searched for the terms “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris” presidential race 2024.” The first U.S.-based right-of-center result for the Trump prompt did not appear until the sixth search result on page 11, a New York Post article. This means that users had to pass over around a hundred search results before The Post. 

Google did not display a single article from a U.S.-based right-of-center outlet in the 24 pages of search results for the Harris prompt. The first right-of-center result appeared on page six in the form of a Fox News video. 

Google’s decision to manipulate search results is extremely concerning in light of the “monopolist” search giant’s market dominance. Alphabet subsidiaries Google and YouTube account for upwards of 90 percent of daily internet searches, and Americans lean heavily on search engines for news. According to a November 2023 Pew Research survey, more and more Americans prefer using search engines to get their news, with 15 percent of adults preferring this method—up from 13 percent in 2022 and 11 percent in 2011. 

Beyond hiding right-of-center articles where few users will go, Google also ensured that precious few such articles appeared in the search results at all. Only four U.S.-based right-leaning search results appeared in the first 20 pages of results for the Trump prompt. 

This sort of election interference appeared repeatedly during the last month and a half of campaigning. An MRC Free Speech America study showed that Google required users to wade through a deluge of leftist news articles before getting to Trump’s campaign website.

In response to that study, Trump, who will now become the 47th President of the United States, promised to prosecute Google for election interference. 

“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account on Sept. 27, less than six weeks before winning the 2024 election. “This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!” 

Furthermore, Google buried right-leaning media outlets in its search results on Oct. 1, Oct. 9, Oct. 15, Oct. 22, Oct. 30 and election day itself. The Trump prompt for Oct. 9 produced the most egregious results. The Oct. 9 study found that Google buried the first U.S.-based right-of-center result—a Fox News video—for the Trump prompt on page 23. Nowhere on any of the 26 pages of results did a U.S.-based right-of-center news article appear. 

Methodology 

For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Nov. 12 Google search results of the innocuous words “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” MRC Free Speech America used a private window utilizing the Brave privacy browser to analyze Google search results to limit the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies. MRC Free Speech America also utilized the AllSides media bias chart as a gauge to determine which outlets are “right” and “lean right.” AllSides notes it has a “patent on rating bias and use[s] multiple methodologies,” not a homogenous group or an algorithm. Allsides also notes that “Our methods are: Blind Bias Surveys of Americans, Editorial Reviews by a multipartisan team of panelists who look for common types of media bias, independent reviews, and third-party data.”

Readers should be aware that this report only uses the AllSides list to analyze ratings of outlets considered by AllSides to be “right” and “lean right” and does not necessarily reflect MRC’s characterizations of these outlets.

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