By In SEO, we’ve known for a long time that near invisible factors can have a serious effect on the impression a website leaves on a person. It seems however, that search engines themselves may also influence a person’s attitude and behaviour, even to the point of swaying the way an undecided person might vote.
According to a recent study, published by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson, a voter’s preferences may change depending on how highly a candidate’s name, campaign, or story appears in the rankings.
Using data gathered from two elections, the researchers were able to find that biased rankings were able to sway undecided voters by a degree of 20 per cent or more.
So how did they do it?
Epstein and Robertson supplied people with information about the Australian federal election of 2010 in 2012 (ensuring that their American participants would know little about the politicians involved in the race), letting the mock-voters read about candidates via a simulated search engine.
One group was given positive articles about a candidate, while the other saw positive articles about a different candidate. A further control group was then offered a mixed bag of results about each. Predictably, the people who saw the positive results were more likely to vote for the related politician by more than 48 per cent.
Interestingly, in what scientists call “Vote Manipulation Power,” (VMP) the effect was upheld, even when the researchers dropped a single negative story into the fourth and third positions. Doing so made the results seem more neutral, actually strengthening the trust that the positive articles held.
To escape the conditions of laboratory testing, the researchers also took to India in 2014, just before the Lok Sabha elections. Finding 2,150 undecided voters, the team conducted the same experiment and found that yet again, VMP was present, this time at around 24 per cent – rising to 72 per cent in some demographics.
Epstein says that he, “thought this time we’d be lucky if we got two or three per cent, and my gut said we’re gonna get nothing because this is an intense election environment.”
The study notes that “search rankings are controlled in most countries today by a single company,” suggesting that Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), could actually be more powerful than biased television networks and newspapers such as FOX and The Daily Mail.
But would Google, or any other search engine, rig the search results for an election?
Epstein, who also wrote about SEME in 2013, says that it should be noted that although the potential for political rigging is there, it does not imply that purposeful bias is actually taking place.
Overall, this kind of influence is nothing new – the “Fox News Effect” was discovered early in the millennium, wherein towns that started to receive Fox News became more conservative in their leanings before and during the 2000 presidential election.
This is partially due to a well-known effect called ‘recency’, which means that people have a tendency to make decisions based on the last piece of information that they hear.
When pressed on the issue by The Nation, Google said that its position remained unmoved from an article written two years ago, stating that, “providing relevant answers has been the cornerstone of Google’s approach to search from the very beginning. It would undermine people’s trust in our results and company if we were to change course.”
It’s also worth noting that Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt once said, “there are many, many things that Google could do that we choose not to do.”
On a side note though, this year Google faces anti-trust action from the EU competition watchdog, which accuses the firm of skewing search results in favour of its own shopping service.