DESPITE making heavy use of their platforms, the 45th president is no fan of America’s big tech firms. Nor is he a fan of the press. On August 28th, President Donald Trump took a swipe at both by accusing Google of rigging its search results in favour of “Fake News”. As evidence, the president claimed that 96% of search results for “Trump News” were articles from the “National Left-Wing Media”. Larry Kudlow, the president’s economic adviser, said that the Trump administration is considering regulating how Google presents its results.
In an attempt to answer the question, The Economist wrote a program that searched for “Trump” on Google News every day so far in 2018. We used a browser in Dallas that was cleared of clues about previous searches. We then matched the results with web-traffic statistics from Alexa, an analytics company owned by Amazon, to see how popular each site is (more popular sites show up more often in Google News). Next, we marked a number of news publications as right-leaning or not.
為了回答這個問題，《經濟學人》編寫了一個程序，在2018年截止到當前的每一天裡在Google News搜索“特朗普”。我們使用在達拉斯使用的瀏覽器與之前的搜索沒有任何關係。當時我們將搜索結果與亞馬遜旗下的數據分析企業Alexa提供的網絡流量數據進行比對，想了解每一個網站的流量（流量越多的網站更頻繁地出現在Google News的頭部）。之後，我們標記出是否是右傾化出版機構的數據。
Our analysis finds that, even after accounting for how popular their websites are, fewer articles from right-leaning outlets show up on Google (see chart). To get around the problem that more of America’s reality-based news outlets are left-of-centre, just as conspiracy theorists currently lean right, we then built a model which incorporates data from the Knight Foundation on how trustworthy Americans think each publication is. After controlling for trustworthiness and volume of Trump articles published, we found there was no evidence that ideology influences Google News results.
我們的分析發現，即便是依靠網站的流量 ，右傾新聞機構的文章出現的Google搜索結果裡的數量微乎其微。為了解決更多的美國真實報道的媒體是中左派——正如陰謀論人士目前都是可歸為右傾派，我們後來構建了一個模型，整合了Knight Foundation提供的有關美國人對每一家新聞機構信任度的數據。在調整可信度以及公開發表的有關特朗普文章的數量之後，我們發現沒有證據說明意識形態影響了Google的搜索結果。
Google’s search algorithm takes account of the popularity of articles and how user-friendly websites are, among many other variables. It may be that conservative publications write fewer eye-catching articles about the president. As the chart shows, the results are skewed by the popularity of three outlets that have done some of the best reporting on this presidency. A final possibility is that liberals, despite their horror, are simply more compelled to read about Mr Trump than conservatives are.
Google的搜索算法是按照文章的流量量和網站對用戶的友好體驗試種以及其它一些變量來實現的。有可能的是，保守派出版機構有關特朗普的文章不能吸引眼球。如上圖所示，搜索結果是由三家新聞機構的閱讀量所影響，因為這三所媒體對於特朗普政府的報道出類拔萃。最終的可能性是，儘管自由派人士深感不安，卻更比保守派人士更為強迫性的閱讀有關特朗普的文章。
來源：經濟學人（2018.08.30）
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