How Much Search Engine Bias is There Against AmRen.com?

In 2016, half of all visitors to AmRen.com came to us through an “organic search,” meaning that they typed something into Google or another search engine, saw AR in the results, and clicked through to us.

In the following years, traffic from organic searches fell. By April 2020, only 17.75 percent of our traffic came from searches. By March 2022, the percentage was down to 11.84. Two years ago, I tried to analyze the extent to which Google’s algorithm is biased against AmRen.com, and found plenty of evidence that there was an anti-American Renaissance slant in its search results. More recently, I searched nine different phrases on five different search engines: DuckDuckGo, Bing, Google, Yandex, and StartPage. I used an incognito window, and signed out of all my email and social media accounts so that my own web history didn’t influence the searches.

The first seven searches were of subjects AmRen covers extensively and that should return high-ranking results if search engines were objective. Here are the results. In every case, the phrase was searched without quotes and I stopped combing through the results after the tenth page.

Black crime

DuckDuckGo: No results from AmRen.com
Bing: No results from AmRen.com
Google: The 96th result is https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/
Yandex: The fourth result is https://www.amren.com/videos/2022/04/black-crime-why-our-rulers-hide-it/
StartPage: The 72nd result is https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/

Interracial crime:

DuckDuckGo: The tenth result is https://www.amren.com/features/2020/12/race-and-crime-who-attacks-whom/
Bing: The seventh result is https://www.amren.com/features/2020/12/race-and-crime-who-attacks-whom/
Google: The ninth result is https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/
Yandex: The first result is https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/
StartPage: The ninth result is https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/

Websites can pay Google to run ads that display when people search for certain phrases (though Google won’t let AR run ads). Some conservative sites buy ads for some searches about race and crime. Here’s an ad from the Daily Wire that appears at the bottom of the first page of results for interracial crime:

White fertility

DuckDuckGo: First result is https://www.amren.com/news/2019/01/fertility-rate-for-white-women-plummets-below-the-limit-needed-to-maintain-the-population-in-every-us-state/
Bing: First (after an ad) result is https://www.amren.com/news/2019/01/fertility-rate-for-white-women-plummets-below-the-limit-needed-to-maintain-the-population-in-every-us-state/
Google: No results from AmRen.com
Yandex: No results from AmRen.com (However, other dissident websites rank highly on this search.)
StartPage: No results from AmRen.com

Although the Bing results are good, for some reason an ad for the book White Fragility also appears:

Rape by race

DuckDuckGo: The eighth result is https://www.amren.com/features/2020/12/race-and-crime-who-attacks-whom/
Bing: The seventh result is https://www.amren.com/features/2020/12/race-and-crime-who-attacks-whom/
Google: No results from AmRen.com
Yandex: The 41st result is https://www.amren.com/archives/reports/the-color-of-crime-2016-revised-edition/
StartPage: No results from AmRen.com

Years ago, my essay “Black-on-White Rape” ranked highly on these kinds of searches.

Race and crime

DuckDuckGo: No results from AmRen.com
Bing: No results from AmRen.com
Google: No results from AmRen.com
Yandex: The third result is https://www.amren.com/news/2020/05/race-and-crime-in-america-statistics/
StartPage: No results from AmRen.com

For this search, too, conservatives have bought Google ads:

Race and intelligence

DuckDuckGo: The 71st result is https://www.amren.com/news/2017/07/race-and-differences-in-intelligence-evidence/
Bing: No results from AmRen.com
Google: No results from AmRen.com
Yandex: The fourth result is https://www.amren.com/news/2019/10/race-differences-in-intelligence-richard-lynn/
StartPage: No results from AmRen.com

Race and IQ

DuckDuckGo: The 81st result is https://www.amren.com/news/2017/07/race-and-differences-in-intelligence-evidence/
Bing: No results from AmRen.com
Google: No results from AmRen.com
Yandex: No results from AmRen.com (However, other dissident websites rank highly on this search.)
StartPage: No results from AmRen.com

The searches so far are about controversial subjects that American Renaissance covers often. For my eighth search, I wanted to see how well book reviews on American Renaissance ranked. Jared Taylor recently reviewed the latest Thaddeus Stevens biography, so I searched:

Thaddeus Stevens biography review

DuckDuckGo: The 45th result is Mr. Taylor’s review https://www.amren.com/features/2021/10/adored-now-for-what-he-was-once-hated/
Bing: The 115th result is Mr. Taylor’s review https://www.amren.com/features/2021/10/adored-now-for-what-he-was-once-hated/
Google: No results from AmRen.com
Yandex: No results from AmRen.com
StartPage: No results from AmRen.com

StartPage had only seven pages worth of results, but Mr. Taylor’s review still didn’t make the cut. Google, which normally returns hundreds of thousands and even millions of results, produced only 83 results for this search, none of which was the review.

My final search phrase was:

white identity by jared taylor

DuckDuckGo: The third result is https://store.amren.com/product/white-identity/
Bing: The third result is https://store.amren.com/product/white-identity/
Google: The 33rd result is https://store.amren.com/product/white-identity/
Yandex: The second result is https://www.amren.com/blog/2021/07/white-identity-jared-taylor-multiculturalism/
StartPage: The 28th result is https://store.amren.com/product/white-identity/

The results from Google are especially biased. Many of the top hits are negative profiles of Mr. Taylor that have little, if anything, to do with his book White Identity. The fourth result is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Extremist File” on Mr. Taylor. The seventh is to a chapter about Mr. Taylor from an academic book about the “radical right.” The eighth is an interview with Mr. Taylor published by Vox in 2016.

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As I have shown here and here, a search for a sentence from an AmRen (or VDARE) article will, whenever possible, return results from mainstream websites quoting that sentence before the result for the original website appears.

Since 2010, Google has been used for at least 85 percent of the world’s web searches. Of the nine search phrases above, in six cases, AmRen did not appear in its top 100 results. Over 90 percent of people who search something on Google do not go past the first page of results — and the same is probably true of other search engines. Google’s closest competitor, Bing, has never been used for more than 8 percent of all searches. In four of the nine searches, Bing had no result from AmRen in the first ten pages.

Although DuckDuckGo was long considered best for unbiased searches, that has changed. In March, MSNBC reported:

DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, the privacy-focused search engine has “down-ranked” websites in its search results that are “associated with Russian disinformation.”

“Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine️,” Weinberg wrote in a tweet thread on his personal Twitter account explaining DuckDuckGo’s actions.

Bing did something similar. This is a slippery slope.

Yandex ranked AmRen highly in many of the above searches, but it is Russian, and often tailors its results for Europeans, so I doubt many Americans would use it as their default search engine.

Barring some kind of regulatory requirement to use unbiased algorithms, American Renaissance is unlikely to be treated fairly by search engines, just as it’s unlikely to be allowed to rejoin mainstream social media platforms.

The best way for AmRen to reach new audiences is for readers to spread the word.