A little more than a thousand algorithm writers are ultimately responsible for the results you see when you conduct a Google (GOOG, GOOGL) search.

A few details revealed about the “Wizard of Oz”-like group offered a peek behind Google’s opaque search methodology curtain, as House Judiciary Committee members probed CEO Sundar Pichai Tuesday about how it handles queries. However, Pichai apparently did little to calm Republican lawmakers’ concerns over suspected political bias, nor did he shed much light on how Google produces what he called “neutral” results.

Throughout the 3.5-hour-long hearing, Republican Congress members posed skepticism about how the search engine selects and ranks user queries — often suggesting Google is biased against conservative voices.

“By ranking pages, Google search always favors one page over another. This kind of bias appears harmless,” Committee Chair Rep. William Goodlatte (R-MA) said in his opening statement.

“After all, the point of a search is to discriminate among multiple relevant sources to find the best answer. This process, however, turns much more sinister with allegations that Google manipulates its algorithm to favor the political party it likes, the ideas that it likes, or the products that it likes.”



View photos Google CEO Sundar Pichai appears before the House Judiciary Committee to be questioned about the internet giant’s privacy security and data collection, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018. Pichai angered members of a Senate panel in September by declining their invitation to testify about foreign governments’ manipulation of online services to sway U.S. political elections. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)’A completely black box’ More

Republican lawmakers are not the only critics who accuse Google of producing biased results. Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of search engine DuckDuckGo, argues that, political bias aside, Google’s search results are fundamentally biased because they are based on identifying information gained from the device on which the search is performed.

“Google is manipulating search and news results to bias them towards what it thinks it knows about people, based on the troves of personal data it has on them,” Weinberg told Yahoo Finance. “This filtering and censoring of search and news results is putting users in a bubble of information that mirrors and exacerbates ideological divides.”

In a study released last week, DuckDuckGo concluded that Google is providing unique search results for different users who search for identical terms, within seconds and minutes of each other. Its results are consistent with an earlier study by the company that Weinberg says inspired a similar study commissioned by the Wall Street Journal in 2012.

“When you access any website your computer is automatically sending information about itself,” Weinberg said. “That information can be used to uniquely target you and identify you, such as IP address, type of browsers, operating system versions, installed fonts, screen sizes, all those things that make your computer unique.”

Google’s search result customization, which some might call bias, he says, is possible because each user’s array of identifying information installed on their device looks a little different from the person next to them.

“They know a lot more than search, browsing, and purchase history,” Weinberg said.

View photos Google CEO Sundar Pichai is greeted by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as Pichai arrives to testify at a House Judiciary Committee hearing “examining Google and its Data Collection, Use and Filtering Practices” on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., December 11, 2018. REUTERS/Jim Young More

“If you sign out of Google and go to private ‘incognito’ mode, they still know it’s your device, so they can still use all your past search history to tailor those results, even though you’re not logged in.”