Study: Google can choose the president of the United States by changing the search results

Since 2013, American psychologist Robert Epstein conducted research in the United States and India in order to find out how the issuance of the Google search engine can affect people's political preferences. The result - manipulating the issue of Google can change the preferences of voters in the US up to 80%. In fact, if necessary and desired, Google can choose the new US president.



Half of the search clicks are in the first two lines of the results. 90% - for the first ten lines. Google is the leader in the search engine market, and the company is using a ranking system to decide how to place each of the billions of pages in the list.

Robert Epstein thought that the top lines would not greatly influence people's political preferences. But it turned out that issuing a search engine could increase the desire to vote for a certain candidate by 48% . In this case, three-quarters of the subjects did not know that they see the modified results of the issue.
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Epstein conducted several experiments , one of which was attended by two thousand people from fifty states. In some demographic groups, manipulation of voters reached 80%: that is, 8 out of 10 people who saw certain results in the extradition, would vote for the right candidate.

Then Epstein decided to check whether it is possible to manipulate the votes in the middle of the real election race, when people from all sides are cast with PR candidates. For this, the team went to India for the election of the Prime Minister. Scientists have hired 2150 people over 27 years old from 35 Indian states. To take part in the study, these people had to be registered as voters, but not yet cast their vote and decide.

Epstein thought that manipulating the issue would have a small effect, if at all, affect the choice when candidates try to use all possible channels to get votes. But he was wrong again: on average, people preferred the given candidate by 20% more often, and for certain demographic groups this result was 60%.

We found something important, given the dominance of Google in the search engine market. Google has almost a monopoly on the US search engine market - it is used by 83% of Americans according to the Pew Research Center. So if Google comes out for one candidate in an election, its effect on undecided users can easily decide the outcome of the vote.

And now - a couple of words for lovers of world conspiracies. Beat in Google "The Groundwork", click on the first line and see just such a page . According to experts of the US Democratic Party, this project is a start - up head of Alphabet Eric Schmidt , created with the goal of making President Hillary Clinton.