Google conspiracy theory

With 85% of the search engine market, Google has a dominant position on the Internet. It is in the enviable position of having its brand name become a verb - i.e. to "google" something. So, it's a bit disturbing to hear the claim that it's using its market domination to promote a certain ideological viewpoint.

Yet, that claim has been made. Google the term googlegate. (No, I didn't make that up.) Now enter the term googlegate in the Bing search engine. Did you notice the number of results returned? I got 29,700 in Google vs. a whopping 82.7 million in Bing. Do the same with climategate. My numbers show 1.7 million in Google vs. 63.8 million in Bing. Why the difference?

Well, according to many bloggers and most recently Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post, it's evidence that Google is manipulating the results to suppress contrary views on climate change. Hence the term googlegate, which, supposedly Google is also suppressing.

Now, it seems odd to me that a company with a market cap of $183 billion would risk its credibility to suppress a few conspiracy theories. So I did a bit of testing myself. On a hunch, I tried schoolhouse. Google returned 4.2 million results. Bing returned 1.2 billion results. Bingo (excuse the pun). I tried springgate. No, I don't know what a springgate is either but Bing found an astounding 72 million results. Google found just 47,500. Finally runtime returned 605 million results in Bing compared to 37 million in Google. Maybe there's no conspiracy at all. Maybe the two search engines just work differently.

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone but it pays to be careful. Things can seem plausible at first until you look behind the curtain.