Show Your WorkGoogle the Giant
How We Analyzed Google’s Search Results
Novel categorizations and “staining” techniques uncovered how much space on the search results page Google dedicates to itself
Leon Yin
Investigative Data Journalist
Leon Yin translates story ideas into testable hypotheses—the cornerstone of our journalism. He builds bespoke datasets and uses interdisciplinary methods to report on technology. Leon left The Markup in July 2023.
His reporting of Google search’s self-referential results was cited in the opening remarks of a congressional hearing on tech giants and antitrust. In 2022, he won a Gerald Loeb Award for Personal Finance and Consumer Reporting with Adrianne Jeffries for their series, “Amazon’s Advantage.”
Before joining The Markup, he was a research scientist at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, a research affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute, and a software engineer at NASA.
Google the Giant
Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google
The search engine dedicated almost half of the first page of results in our test to its own products, which dominated the coveted top of the page
Google the Giant
Google Ad Portal Equated “Black Girls” with Porn
Searching Google’s ad buying portal for “Black girls” returned hundreds of terms leading to “adult content”
Google the Giant
To Gmail, Most Black Lives Matter Emails Are “Promotions”
Google shuffled mass emails about racial justice into the marketing tab in our test, mirroring its categorization of political emails
Google the Giant
Swinging the Vote?
Google’s black box algorithm controls which political emails land in your main inbox. For 2020 presidential candidates, the differences are stark.
Show Your WorkGoogle the Giant
How We Examined Gmail's Treatment of Political Emails
We conducted an experiment with a new email address to try to figure out how Gmail's sorting algorithm worked without user input
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