Searching for Elected Officials: Google’s Prioritization of Political Information

Abstract

How does Google Search direct people to information about their elected offcials? To answer this, we conducted daily searches for members of the US House of Representatives from all 435 US congressional districts and DC between September 1 and December 31, 2020, resulting in 20.1 million search engine results pages (SERPs) and 302 million search results. We find that these search results are dominated by a small number of mainstream sources (eg. Twitter, Wikipedia), with the top seven domains accounting for 64.2% of all results. There was no significant difference in the partisanship of search results depending on whether the member whose name was searched was a Democrat or Republican. Additionally, we found a clear prioritization of politician-controlled social media, government, and personal websites over news media, local news outlets over national ones, and reliable news over unreliable news. We observed a lack of sensitivity to search location, where searching for a given member’s name on the same day but from different locations yielded similar results.