US President Donald Trump dove into the realm of SEO forums this week by providing his opinion on Google search results and their alleged bias towards positive news about him. But like so many other SEO newbies, Trump seems to be operating with a fundamentally flawed notion of how search engines actually work.
In a pair of tweets sent out early Tuesday morning, the most powerful man in the world said:
Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!
While no one likes to see search results that are 96 percent negative, the results Trump sees when searches (or reads about searches) on topics like Trump News is that those results are a mirror of the content that’s actually out there. As a company that serves up results for searches ranging from “Love Thy Neighbor” to “Where’s the closest Klan Rally?”, Google benefits from serving up accurate, relevant information rather than serving a political agenda.
Of course Trump didn’t actually Google Trump News to find out about the alleged bias. He was actually parroting an article that was tweeted by conservative commentator Lou Dobbs that suggests Google is “deprioritizing” conservative news content. The methodology used in the original article was deeply flawed and its thesis wasn’t based on Google’s actual business practices.
Trump, however, took the whole thing quite seriously and threatened to take some sort of legal action against the search giant.
For its part, Google largely ignored the matter, though it did release a statement pointing out that Google search algorithms are designed to answer questions posed by users, not to promote political agendas.