Google’s search bias against conservative news sites has been quantified, by Leo Goldstein.

The percentage of domain traffic referred by Google Search, net of brand searches (PGSTN), tends to be in or around the range 25%-30% for a broad class of web domains. …

When PGSTN is high, it means Google searches show them a lot. If PGSTN is low, it means the website or web domain doesn’t show up so much in Google searches. Finally, someone has done the numbers and found what we already knew.

Google Search is found to be extremely biased in favor of climate alarmism and against climate realism. The PGSTN ranges for climate realism and climate alarmism do not even overlap! Some of the most important climate realist domains, including low-controversial judithcurry.com, have such a low PGSTN that they can be considered blacklisted by Google. …

On the other hand, self-appointed “fact checkers,” including snopes.com and politifact.com have PGSTN about 50%. That gives ground to the suspicion that they had been hand-picked by Google for prioritization. …

Google Search is found to be biased in favor of left/liberal domains and against conservative domains with a confidence of 95%. Further, certain hard-Left domains have such a high PGSTN that their standing raises suspicions that they have been hand-picked for prominent placement. Certain respected conservative domains are blacklisted. …

The results show that Google Search is heavily biased against conservative domains, and some respectable conservative domains seem to be blacklisted …

The downranking of climate skeptic sites was quite sudden and noticeable in about 2011. One day the skeptic sites disappeared or moved further down the front page of Google searches.

Looking for a search engine to replace Google? Joanne and I recently switched to using DuckDuckGo as our default search engine, instead of Google. I like it, and Joanne is saying she prefers it. It’s a little better in some ways, and I’m not missing Google.

hat-tip Chris, Charles