Google News and Machine Gatekeepers: Algorithmic Personalisation and News Diversity in Online News Search

Figures & data

Table 1. Mean number of differences in the top five search results for each term.

	Theresa May	Jeremy Corbyn	People’s Vote	Immigration
Mean differences	3.24	2.96	0.91	1.53
Minimum differences	1	1	0	0
Maximum differences	5	5	5	5
Standard deviation	0.95	1.07	0.95	1.23

Table 2. Relationships between personal characteristics and diversity of search results for each search term.

Variable	Theresa May		Jeremy Corbyn		People’s Vote		Immigration
	rs	p	rs	p	rs	p	rs	p
Self-identified political leaning	0.13	0.23	0.28	0.01*	−0.01	0.98	0.21	0.07
Favourability towards search term	−0.01	0.89	−0.04	0.74	0.16	0.16	−0.19	0.10
Age	0.21	0.06	0.21	0.06	0.02	0.83	0.13	0.26
Education	−0.05	0.68	0.03	0.76	−0.18	0.11	−0.01	0.90

Note: Spearman tests of correlation. *Result is significant at the 0.05 level.

Figure 1. News recommendations in Google News searches for "Theresa May."

Figure 2. News recommendations in Google News searches for "Jeremy Corbyn."

Table 3. News outlets that ranked amongst the top five most popular stories across Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn searches.

Outlet	Total number of recommendations	% of all recommendations	Headquarters	Original medium
The Guardian	120	15%	London	Newspaper
Sky News	87	11%	London	Broadcaster
BBC News	80	10%	London	Broadcaster
Daily Express	62	8%	London	Newspaper
London Evening Standard	57	7%	London	Newspaper
Independent	50	7%	London	Newspaper
Daily Mail	46	6%	London	Newspaper
The Telegraph	44	6%	London	Newspaper
New Statesman	35	5%	London	Magazine

Table 4. Average favourability slant for each search term in Google News results.

	Theresa May	Jeremy Corbyn	People’s Vote	Immigration
Average Slant	−0.5	−0.28	0.73	0.24
Standard Deviation	0.5	0.45	0.45	0.48

Note: −1 represents unfavourable, +1 represents favourable.

Table 5. Correlations between search terms, favourability and political leaning.

Variable	Theresa May		Jeremy Corbyn		People’s Vote		Immigration
	rs	p	rs	P	rs	p	rs	p
Favourability towards search term	−0.064	0.58	−0.168	0.14	−0.08	0.49	−0.08	0.47
Self-identified political leaning	0.073	0.52	0.026	0.82	0.10	0.38	−0.227	0.05*

Note: Spearman tests of correlation. *Result is significant at the 0.05 level.

Table 6. Percentage of recommendations for six news sources, based on whether participants are readers or non-readers of that source.

	Guardian	Independent	BBC News	Sky News	Daily Mail	The Sun
Readers: links from source	18.03% (75/416)	4.35% (12/276)	11.95% (149/1247)	6.21% (26/419)	5.04% (24/476)	0.92% (2/217)
Non-readers: links from source	18.50% (209/1130)	3.78% (48/1270)	12.37% (37/299)	5.50% (62/1127)	3.93% (42/1070)	1.50% (20/1329)

Table 7. Percentage of recommendations for the six news sources, grouped by political leaning, based on whether participants are readers or non-readers of a source of that political leaning.

	Left-wing sources (Independent and Guardian)	Centre sources (BBC News and Sky News)	Right-wing sources (Daily Mail and The Sun)
Readers: links from sources	21.25% (109/513)	17.95% (231/1287)	6.53% (35/536)
Non-readers: links from sources	22.75% (235/1033)	16.60% (43/259)	5.25% (53/1010)