Nikhil Subramaniam

As India prepares for a new era under a new Prime Minister, reports are emerging about Google having 'fixed' the Indian election results.

As incredulous as it sounds, reports have surfaced asking whether Google had a hand in fixing the elections. Computer Business Review supposedly reveals "How Google search results are influencing elections" in its article. And it wasn't long before even international media got in on the act. Never to miss out on a juicy headline, UK's The Daily Mail asks rather innocently, "Could Google fix an election?"

But let's face it. Even with as much as information as Google deals with every minute, it'd be pretty hard for Google to fix an election where nearly 500 million people voted. In any case, the company has rolled out a statement denying any such role in the results. "Providing relevant answers has been the cornerstone of Google's approach to search from the very beginning," a spokesman told The Guardian in the UK. "Our results reflect what's on the web, and we rigorously protect the integrity of our algorithms. It would undermine people's trust in our results and company if we were to change course."

The entire episode stems from a press release handed out by the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology titled "Could Google have fixed the Lok Sabha elections? A landmark new study in India shows it's possible". Another publication, as the Guardian points out, says "Democracy at risk: how voters in the 2014 elections in India were manipulated by biased search rankings." Both looked at the same study that sought to understand how undecided voters could be influenced by a bias in search results favoring one or the other candidate. When skewed on purpose, test subjects are likely to base their opinion on the results. However, that study had mock search results and not real Google search results.

What's baffling is that the original academic paper written by Robert Epstein dealt with Australian politicians and has no mention of the 2014 Indian elections at all. The authors of the secondary reports seem to have repeated the experiment with similar results, but presumably didn't factor in the different demographics, voting trends, already existing voter bias, specific to the Indian state. So this is just an example of creative extrapolation.

In any case, the original paper's goal it seems is to have a regulatory body combing over search results related to elections to make sure such fixing was not possible, since the authors said that almost all of their test subjects were unaware of search results being biased, which is a possible real world scenario.