or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called “knowledge panels” and “featured snippets,” and news results, which aren’t subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change. Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results.The company also boosts some major websites, such asĪccording to people familiar with the matter. Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser,Ĭontrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action.More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal: Google’s evolving approach marks a shift from its founding philosophy of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear. They have increased sharply since the 2016 election and the rise of online misinformation, the Journal found. Those actions often come in response to pressure from businesses, outside interest groups and governments around the world. Over time, Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. The company states in a Google blog, “We do not use human curation to collect or arrange the results on a page.” It says it can’t divulge details about how the algorithms work because the company is involved in a long-running and high-stakes battle with those who want to profit by gaming the system.īut that message often clashes with what happens behind the scenes. Google executives have said repeatedly-in private meetings with outside groups and in congressional testimony-that the algorithms are objective and essentially autonomous, unsullied by human biases or business considerations. Twenty years ago, Google founders began building a goliath on the premise that its search algorithms could do a better job combing the web for useful information than humans.

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