Four scholars from Swiss and German universities studied “the presence of pages promoting conspiracy theories” across the world’s main search engines by “conducting a comparative algorithm audit to examine the distribution of conspiratorial information” in their search results.
Juhi Kulshrestha, Mykola Makhortykh, Roberto Ulloa and Aleksandra Urman used a virtual agent-based infrastructure to “sytematically collect search outputs for six conspiracy theory-related queries: ‘flat earth,’ ‘new world order,’ ‘qanon,’ ‘9/11,’ ‘ lluminati,’ ‘george soros’.” The research was made in two US location and one UK location in March and May 2021.
They found that all search engines except Google — first and foremost Yandex, in many regards — “consistently displayed conspiracy-promoting results and returned links to conspiracy-dedicated websites in their top results,” with a various share of such content across queries.
In particular:
- Yandex search results in English language return a higher share of conspiracy-promoting content than those of other search engines, reveals a study
- Yandex is also less likely than Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo to return hyperlinks to scientific sources debunking conspiracy theories.
“The fact that these observations are consistent across different locations and time periods highlight the possibility of some search engines systematically prioritizing conspiracy-promoting content and, thus, amplifying their distribution in the online environments,” the scholars wrote.
Prevalence of content with different stances toward conspiracy theories per engine (queries in English language)
Prevalence of different source types per engine (queries in English language)
This article was updated following Yandex’s comments. EWDN is expecting additional comments regarding its search results in Russian language.
Yandex’s English-language search results return more conspiracy-promoting content than other search enginesRead More
