Excerpt from: Google Revs Up Election Interference Gambit Before GOP Primary Debate, Buries Republicans

By: Gabriela Pariseau and Michael Morris

Google’s election interference is just getting warmed up as we head into 2024. 

MRC Free Speech America researchers searched Google for “presidential campaign websites,” but the search engine did not display [Doug Burgum's website] or a single [other] Republican candidate's campaign site on its first page of results the day before the first Republican Party presidential primary debate on Wednesday. President Joe Biden’s campaign website, of course, showed up as the second search result along with a Democratic Party challenger Marianne Williamson’s campaign website, which came up as the fifth result. 

Google even displayed results for past failed Democratic Party presidential candidates who aren’t even running this cycle, including Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) website, which showed up as the ninth result; Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) campaign website, which came in twelfth; and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign website, which appeared twenty-ninth in the results. 

Notably, 2024 Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., did not appear in Google’s search results even though he is, at present, the biggest threat to President Joe Biden's nomination. 

For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Aug. 22 Google search results of presidential campaign websites. MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies.

MRC Free Speech America researchers searched the innocuous words “presidential campaign websites" using the algorithm. To determine bias, our researchers looked at Google’s results and recorded the rank(s) of each candidate’s campaign website on the first page of results.