Donald Trump claimed Google’s search engine is rigged; what do we really know about how it works?
From what happens when you run a Google search to whether the web search engine tailors its results, to how it works in different countries – we have the all facts you need to know
These days most of us rely constantly on Google to find out what to buy, which restaurants to eat at and how to get from one place to another. But, partly by design, how Google does its job can still seem deeply mysterious, giving rise to theories about the way it supposedly operates. Is it possible for Google to manipulate your results? Would it?
Google denies that it does. “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we do not bias our results toward any political ideology,” the company said last week. “We never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
Trump says US tech giants are treading on troubled territory
Google’s claim may be small comfort to those convinced that their own results are being skewed. But the recent dust up between US President Donald Trump – who accused the search engine of being “rigged” – and Google is a perfect opportunity to shed light on what we do know about Google and its search algorithm.
What happens when you run a Google search?
At a high level, Google’s search engine is based on a long list of websites from which Google has already scraped information, using automated software it calls a “crawler”. The crawler gathers keywords and other data about sites on the internet, and at this point billions of webpages have been analysed this way.
When users type in a search query, Google takes their request and goes looking in its records for any matches. Then it faces another problem: how to organise all the results.