YOUR BIASED SEARCH

Harvard professor Ben Edelman and colleague Benjamin Lockwood found that Google's algorithm links to Gmail, YouTube, and other house brands three times more often than other search engines. Search terms such as “mail”, “email”, “maps”, or “video” all yield top results featuring Google's services, they found. The practice, which Yahoo! was also found to engage in albeit less blatantly – puts the search engines' interests ahead of users' need for unbiased data about the most useful sites on the web, they warned. NPR