Looks interesting....

for info about a long-known related finding from political science.

Like the authors of the PNAS.org-linked study in the OP, authors of ballot-order studies looked at the effect of rank-order for the same menus of choices. There's a distinct advantage from being at or near the top of a list.

It is quite interesting and I can totally see the author's point. I have to wonder if this has been done yet in American political elections and if so at what level. It leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

Shared it on my Facebook page as well.

They start with Assembly District 1: they pick a letter to be first, then list the candidates starting with that letter. In District 2, candidate #2 becomes candidate #1 and so on. The upshot is that often no two district list candidates for all elections in the same order.

political campaign coverage in search engines could eliminate "SEME":

Outlaw selling AdWord space at the top of political news search results pages, and force randomization of ranks for results from a given set of search keywords for political news.

am skeptical the Constitution delegates such power to federal or state governments.

First Amendment Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press would seem to apply. If you can't apply the same regulation on the NYT or WaPo, you wouldn't get away applying it to online providers either.

Google already tailors the content it thinks you want to see. I recommend viewing Eli Pariser's TED Talk on "Filter Bubbles".

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en

has to include shortening campaign periods and licensing providers of comprehensive internet search engines.

Corporations want to run our government, now, it seems one actually could. Forget Die bolt, now, Google could pick the next President, and it might be someone we might not want or like.

to do lots of crazy things, like destroy the global economy. Thanks, Bill Clinton!

He felt our pain and then thought "Oh what the hell...."

It would have to be done on a constant ongoing basis. New information about candidates comes along on large numbers of sites every minute of every day. Constantly directing people to all negative or all positive stories about a given candidate would require constant almost moment to moment monitoring of large numbers of news sources and blogs and constant moment to moment tweaking of search results.

Doing this on a controlled search engine in an experimental setting is completely different from doing it on Google in the real world.

for a wide variety of common searches, Google's PageRank algo must have extensive facilities for exactly the micromgt you're suggesting. But no one outside top a few top Google execs really knows.

Do you have a cite showing that they actually sell top ranking? If they do it can't be secret because how would they sell it if it's secret? If they do it then there's a page somewhere listing prices or where you can request pricing.

Even if they can do this, someone buying top ranking in results isn't the same as micromanaging news results. And if they could do that, it's not something that could be hidden from the many programmers and other employees at Google.

Page is for sale, at least partially. See https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722087?hl=en.

And it would be easy to drive traffic to biased sites by, for example, automatically adding '+inurl:foxnews' when certain keywords are used.

elections, so while Google may be more impressive (assuming its algorithm wasn't used), it's hardly new.

intervention on a case-by-case basis. Just enter a new factor into the programming, and it will return the data any way they want.

I do a lot of political research, and it's a given that the links that come up are conservative. It's very hard to get past them. It does give the appearance that the public is more conservative than liberal, although we know that's untrue. So that illusion can sway public opinion. And as a mathematician in Kansas recently published, voting machines are rigged. Why in 2015, in one of the world's most technologically advanced nations, are our voting machines owned by companies from one political party--the GOP? Shouldn't they be owned by entities who are non-political? Why do touch screen machines have no paper trail? This is madness, and we're idiots for not demanding that our votes be secure and free from hacking. When the future of our country is determined by the vote, it should be sacrosanct.

be more subtle than you are suggesting, and perhaps real but unintentional, don't you think?

Some Bush toadie, I think Rumsfeld, is a principle. Gilead is the first suggestions with gile, it comes up in science news frequently, for "news" that appears for no other similar company. It seems that Google either loves them, or they are paying for attention.

Stocks are very much like elections, with the exception that people spend much more time considering what to invest in than who to vote for. Considering the immediate, invisible influence that Google could have on the stock market and elections gives one pause.

a widespread disease? See http://smp.businesswire.com/pages/us-food-and-drug-administration-approves-gileads-harvoni-ledipasvirsofosbuvir-first-once-daily .

Gilead must get attention both for its almost unique scientific accomplishment as well as for the outrageous prices it charges for Harvoni, almost guaranteed to force Hepatitis C patients to choose between not curing their disease and going into bankruptcy.

(SEO) is an art and a science. IMO it will be very interesting to see how Google responds to this article. SEO seems likely to become another front for political warfare, if it hasn't already become one.

implicitly allows for tilting the playing field if it achieves an outcome which they believe is "for the greater good". It is the "I know what's best for you" attitude.

It is anti-democratic. Those of us who actually believe in democracy don't believe in it.

What had me wondering about the 2014 election was a number of months (in the early spring) all we heard about on the news and net was how the Republicans were in trouble. I had the impression that the Democrats would keep the Senate and possibly make a significant difference in the House.

Later, much closer to the election, Nate Silver came out with the surprise (to me at least) prediction that the Republicans would not only take the Senate and House but do it in a major way. I wonder if he knew about this bit of google BS in advance and uses it in his work.

Everyone I talked to in the early spring of 2014 felt rather good about Democratic chances and were quite surprised at the turn-around.

Just a thought.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/registered-voter-polls-will-usually-overrate-democrats/

“Polls of so-called likely voters are almost always more favorable to Republicans than those that survey the broader sample of all registered voters or all American adults. Likely voter polls also tend to provide more reliable predictions of election results, especially in midterm years. Whereas polls of all registered voters or all adults usually overstate the performance of Democratic candidates, polls of likely voters have had almost no long-term bias.”

Silver’s post gives tables of the pro-Democrat bias for Presidential and non-Presidential election years, and explains that wealthier, more Republican jurisdictions provide better access to the polls and that wealthier jurisdictions are more engaged in national politics.

The Party leadership simply chose to ignore the obvious - the mood of the progressive base determines GOTV, and that mood has never been more depressed and hostile than it was last year, and is now even worse with an inevitable Hillary still at the top of the ticket.

The only thing that might save us from having the GOP controlling all three bodies are the incredibly unattractive occupants of the Clown Car. I wouldn't count on that. We need another candidate - Hillary's negatives are so high that more people will turn out to vote against her - that isn't going to change by Fall 2016.

Google sent me to Communist Party headquarters.

However, ranking is strongly influenced by the number of links to a particular source. If 8,000 web sites have a link to a NYT story about Trump, then a Google search result pointing to that NYT story will show up higher in rankings when keywords applicable to that article are searched. If only a few dozen web sites point to that NYT article, then it will rank a lot lower.

So, all Republicans have to do is make a whole lot of noise (which they're good at) and have all of their blogs and articles contain links to Trump and Bush stories on the Internet, and those stories will rank higher when applicable key words are searched. This phenomenon may counter the results of the presumed Goggle algorithm manipulations in favor of Democrats.

Also, I'm sure the Republican voter suppression laws will be more than adequate to counter this Google-ized ballot order bias being alleged.

article appeared does not hide behind a pay-wall: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes .

As you point out, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is possible, and, if Republicans are better at it than Democrats--perhaps because they attract more knowledgable ex-Google programmers by paying them higher salaries--they can get better PageRanks for the websites that skew their way (such as foxnews.com).

decide what does and does not appear in your feed.

People make decisions based on the information they see -- filter the information = change the decision.

and now Emily Latella wants to say something....

What's all this I hear about Al Gore Rhythms ? Al Gore is not a drummer! He dances like Elaine on Seinfeld....never mind.

We would never know.

Wait, "algorithm" is one of them A-rab words, isn't it? It's a Muslin plot!!!

flashing of "VOTE!" ads onto certain users' device screens, and reported inducing hundreds of thousands of votes that otherwise would not have been cast. See the source of the OP at http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes , and in particular page E4513 and refence 44.

"Massive experiments conducted recently by social media giant Facebook have already introduced other unprecedented types of influence made possible by
the Internet. Notably, an experiment reported recently suggested that flashing “VOTE” ads to 61 million Facebook users caused more than 340,000 people to vote that day who otherwise would not have done so (44).

Zittrain has pointed out that if Facebook executives chose to prompt only those people who favored a particular candidate or party, they could easily flip an election in favor of that candidate, performing a kind of 'digital gerrymandering' (45)."

44. Bond RM, et al. (2012) A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature 489(7415):295–298.

45. Zittrain J (2014) Engineering an election. Digital gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy. Harvard Law Review Forum 127(8):335–341.