A recent report from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has revealed that, despite claims to the contrary, Google executives and engineers actively alter the search engine’s results in favor of big business and executives’ opinions, using blacklists and auto-complete to determine which web addresses appear at the top of the search. One of the common search topics the search engine seems to have modified the results for is the term abortion.

Google holds an astounding 90 percent of the market share for all search engines, including Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Bing. It is so widely trusted that it’s become a verb rather than a name in the English language, and it is the most highly trafficked website in the world, helping its parent company earn over $30 billion in annual profit, according to WSJ. Basically, Google holds the power to inform the world and therefore control what versions of the truth it uses to answer the 3.8 million queries typed into the company’s search bar every minute.

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According to the report from WSJ, when Google first began some two decades ago, it was built on the idea that search algorithms would do a better job than human beings in wading through the information available on the internet and spitting out the best results for the search users. In both private meetings and during congressional testimony, top Google executives have said that algorithms are objective and autonomous. They are meant to be “unsullied by human bias or business considerations” according to WSJ.

“We do not use human curation to collect or arrange the results on a page,” reads the Google blog. Yet the corporation doesn’t share details about how exactly the algorithms work, which leads to obvious concerns.

When it comes to abortion, Google appears to take a pro-abortion stance. 39 percent of its first-page results for the term “abortion” direct users to Planned Parenthood’s website. In comparison, only 14 percent of Bing’s first-page results and 16 percent of DuckDuckGo’s first-page results send users to Planned Parenthood.

U.S. foreign law requires that certain sites — such as those showing child abuse or those with copyright infringement — don’t appear in search results, but Google seems to have gone beyond that. WSJ found that Google uses blacklists to determine what appears in the auto-complete function, in which suggestions appear as a person types into the Google search bar. They have done this to block certain information on controversial subjects. This makes some sense when it comes to preventing inappropriate information appearing when a person searches, for example, a celebrity name. But when it comes to topics such as abortion or immigration, the information that the corporation is allegedly blocking isn’t inappropriate; it just doesn’t line up with their opinions.

(Excerpt from Live Action. Article by Nancy Flanders.)