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.

That the White House might retaliate against a company that, it thinks, is not serving the public enough flattering stories, is the kind of norm-flouting that has become normal in 2018. That aside, is Mr Trump right to think the California-based search giant is somehow suppressing conservative thought? The 96% statistic he cited appears to have come from PJ Media, a blog. Paula Bolyard, the post’s author, conducted her analysis by searching for “Trump” on Google’s news tool. Out of the first 100 of her results, only five articles came from what she deemed conservative publications.

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.

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.