This article in Politico says Google could rig the election by changing its search engine parameters.

I don’t buy it. It’s one thing to change the search engine parameters, it’s another thing to shape them to favor one candidate or another. Even more challenging would be to do it secretly. While it might be technically possible, there’s no evidence that Google can muster this kind of immorality. Google has much more to lose by influencing an election than it has to gain.

My guess is that the authors are inciting a bit of fear to get publicity for their research about how search results can influence an election.

Missing from the article is information about how many people actually use a search engine for finding information about candidates. While they’re research showed that 20% or more of people who search for information about the candidates can be swayed by the results, they didn’t say how many people actually inform themselves using such results.

Plus, they seem to have used a canned set of search results that had a mix of persuasive articles in them. While it’s believable that if people see one set of persuasive articles vs another, many of them can be swayed, it’s doubtful that a set of search results would contain such persuasive articles.

Let’s let the researchers monitor Google’s search results, and not add this worry to our mythology about “what’s wrong”.