Media solutions company AllSides conducted a new analysis over a two-week period (March 9-22, 2023) finding that a whopping 83 percent of the news articles displayed on Bing News’ homepage “were from media outlets on the left.” But here’s the kicker: “Bing’s homepage displayed zero news sources rated Right or Lean Right by AllSides,” and only 13 percent of the sources displayed were from the “center.” The top 6 outlets that Bing comnmonly curated were sources that AllSides rated as “Lean Left.” The top sources on Bing News’ homepage included “The Associated Press (Lean Left) (17% of the content), USA Today (Lean Left) (15%), and ABC News (Lean Left) (13%).”

AllSides CEO John Gable blasted Bing in his comments to The Daily Signal. “‘People completely underestimate the dangers of bias when it comes to search engines. They think they are getting balanced information, and they’re not,’” Gable said. “‘Instead, they’re being thrown into divisive filter bubbles that make them confidently ignorant.’”

Bing’s egregious bias showed through even more explicitly when AllSides applied certain search terms to the search engine. Unironically, AllSides noted that the search term which unveiled the most left-wing results was none other than “abortion.” News items that the group identified as “left” made up 63 percent of Bing’s curated results on abortion while only a paltry 9 percent of the results came from sources identified as “right.” The search term “economy” yielded the least amount of right-leaning sources at only 6 percent, according to AllSides, compared to 34 percent of the results being from sources on the “left.”

[I’ve been playing with DuckDuckGo for a while, although not yet as part of my normal workflow. I prefer the way Bing organizes news-article searches over both DDG and Google, but not by much, and it still requires me to peruse the results carefully to ensure I see past any potential bias. Not to mention, of course, all the tracking algorithms and scripts that both Bing and Google use. I may start using DDG instead on a consistent basis and see where it takes me. It’s at duckduckgo.com — Ed]