Biased or Not?: The Story of Two Search Engines

TL;DR

This study empirically analyzes two popular search engines for bias by examining sentiment in results on controversial topics, revealing both are biased and share similar viewpoints.

Contribution

It introduces sentiment-based metrics to quantify bias and compares viewpoints of two search engines on controversial issues.

Findings

Both search engines exhibit bias towards certain viewpoints.

The two search engines share similar biases on controversial topics.

Sentiment analysis effectively reveals bias in search results.

Abstract

Search engines can be considered as a gate to the world of WEB, and they also decide what we see for a given search query. Since many people are exposed to information through search engines, it is fair to expect that search engines should be neutral; i.e. the returned results must cover all the elements or aspects of the search topic, and they should be impartial where the results are returned based on relevance. However, the search engine results are based on many features and sophisticated algorithms where search neutrality is not necessarily the focal point. In this work we performed an empirical study on two popular search engines and analysed the search engine result pages for controversial topics such as abortion, medical marijuana, and gay marriage. Our analysis is based on the sentiment in search results to identify their viewpoint as conservative or liberal. We also propose three sentiment-based metrics to show the existence of bias as well as to compare viewpoints of the two search engines. Extensive experiments performed on controversial topics show that both search engines are biased, moreover they have the same kind of bias towards a given controversial topic.