Search engines in polarized media environment: Auditing political information curation on Google and Bing prior to 2024 US elections

TL;DR

This study audits Google and Bing before the 2024 US elections, revealing they tend to favor left-leaning sources and reflect partisan divides, potentially influencing public polarization.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of how major search engines curate election-related information and how factors like query slant and location affect results.

Findings

Both search engines favor left-leaning sources.

Results vary with query slant and are consistent across locations.

Interface elements show more volatility over time and states.

Abstract

Search engines play an important role in the context of modern elections. By curating information in response to user queries, search engines influence how individuals are informed about election-related developments and perceive the media environment in which elections take place. It has particular implications for (perceived) polarization, especially if search engines' curation results in a skewed treatment of information sources based on their political leaning. Until now, however, it is unclear whether such a partisan gap emerges through information curation on search engines and what user- and system-side factors affect it. To address this shortcoming, we audit the two largest Western search engines, Google and Bing, prior to the 2024 US presidential elections and examine how these search engines' organic search results and additional interface elements represent election-related information depending on the queries' slant, user location, and time when the search was conducted. Our findings indicate that both search engines tend to prioritize left-leaning media sources, with the exact scope of search results' ideological slant varying between Democrat- and Republican-focused queries. We also observe limited effects of location- and time-based factors on organic search results, whereas results for additional interface elements were more volatile over time and specific US states. Together, our observations highlight that search engines' information curation actively mirrors the partisan divides present in the US media environments and has the potential to contribute to (perceived) polarization within these environments.