Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google Inc., speaks during the Google I/O Developers Conference in Mountain View, California, U.S., on Tuesday, May 8, 2018. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google's most important decisions are secret

In the United States, about eight out of 10 web searches are conducted through Google; across Europe, South America and India, Google's share is even higher. Google also owns other major communications platforms, among them YouTube and Gmail, and it makes the Android operating system and its app store. It is the world's dominant internet advertising company, and through that business, it also shapes the market for digital news. Google's power alone is not damning. The important question is how it manages that power, and what checks we have on it. That's where critics say it falls down. Google's influence on public discourse happens primarily through algorithms, chief among them the system that determines which results you see in its search engine. These algorithms are secret, which Google says is necessary because search is its golden goose (it does not want Microsoft's Bing to know what makes Google so great) and because explaining the precise ways the algorithms work would leave them open to being manipulated. But this initial secrecy creates a troubling opacity. Because search engines take into account the time, place and some personalized factors when you search, the results you get today will not necessarily match the results I get tomorrow. This makes it difficult for outsiders to investigate bias across Google's results. A lot of people made fun this week of the paucity of evidence that Mr. Trump put forward to support his claim. But researchers point out that if Google somehow went rogue and decided to throw an election to a favored candidate, it would only have to alter a small fraction of search results to do so. If the public did spot evidence of such an event, it would look thin and inconclusive, too. "We really have to have a much more sophisticated sense of how to investigate and identify these claims," said Frank Pasquale, a professor at the University of Maryland's law school who has studied the role that algorithms play in society. In a law review article published in 2010, Mr. Pasquale outlined a way for regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to gain access to search data to monitor and investigate claims of bias. No one has taken up that idea. Facebook, which also shapes global discourse through secret algorithms, recently sketched out a plan to give academic researchers access to its data to investigate bias, among other issues. Google has no similar program, but Dr. Nayak said the company often shares data with outside researchers. He also argued that Google's results are less "personalized" than people think, suggesting that search biases, when they come up, will be easy to spot. "All our work is out there in the open — anyone can evaluate it, including our critics," he said.

Search biases mirror real-world ones

The kind of blanket, intentional bias Mr. Trump is claiming would necessarily involve many workers at Google. And Google is leaky; on hot-button issues — debates over diversity or whether to work with the military — politically minded employees have provided important information to the media. If there was even a rumor that Google's search team was skewing search for political ends, we would likely see some evidence of such a conspiracy in the media. That's why, in the view of researchers who study the issue of algorithmic bias, the more pressing concern is not about Google's deliberate bias against one or another major political party, but about the potential for bias against those who do not already hold power in society. These people — women, minorities and others who lack economic, social and political clout — fall into the blind spots of companies run by wealthy men in California. It's in these blind spots that we find the most problematic biases with Google, like in the way it once suggested a spelling correction for the search "English major who taught herself calculus" — the correct spelling, Google offered, was "English major who taught himself calculus." Why did it do that? Google's explanation was not at all comforting: The phrase "taught himself calculus" is a lot more popular online than "taught herself calculus," so Google's computers assumed that it was correct. In other words, a longstanding structural bias in society was replicated on the web, which was reflected in Google's algorithm, which then hung out live online for who knows how long, unknown to anyone at Google, subtly undermining every female English major who wanted to teach herself calculus. Eventually, this error was fixed. But how many other such errors are hidden in Google? We have no idea. Google says it understands these worries, and often addresses them. In 2016, some people noticed that it listed a Holocaust-denial site as a top result for the search "Did the Holocaust happen?" That started a large effort at the company to address hate speech and misinformation online. The effort, Dr. Nayak said, shows that "when we see real-world biases making results worse than they should be, we try to get to the heart of the problem."

Google has escaped recent scrutiny