It is an intriguing suggestion - so I decided to test the theory. For the past couple of days, I have been periodically entering the search terms used by OJR on both the U.S. and Canadian versions of Google News. Based on this completely unscientific experiment, I have to agree the George Bush search is much kinder than the John Kerry search. This weekend, the Bush search has been dominated by blogs and other non-traditional media supportive of the incumbent President while the Kerry search yielded more balanced coverage of the challenger from mainstream media.

OJR offers a number of possible reasons for this apparent discrepancy including the fact most media outlets do not use given names in their headlines (bloggers and alternative media do) and mainstream media are more likely to refer to Mr. Kerry as Senator Kerry and John Kerry in the same story - something the Google's algorithm interprets as less precise than the consistent use of one or the other.

I would like to offer a few suggestions of my own.

• There is no question the "news" sources Google spiders are dominated by right-wing thinkers. This is in part because the right has taken to online commentary much more quickly than the left. Since Google bumps the most discussed, freshest and most relevant (by keyword) to the top, issues that are of interest to the right dominate because more people are writing about them more often.
• Google's algorithm doesn't seem to distinguish very much between "news" from issue specific organizations and online content from the mainstream media. The result of this is some interest groups' news is given about as much prominence as news from newspapers, television stations and radio stations.
• Breaking stories posted on mainstream media sites are often initially wire copy from agencies like Reuters or the Associated Press. These stories tend to get grouped together on Google (as they probably should given that they are identical). Most alternative online sources don't pay for wire services and therefore their content is more original and seems to rank better.

All of this is important for people who use Google as a one-stop shop for news to know and understand as good consumers of the media, but I don't think it represents a bias on the part of Google. Instead it illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the internet as a source of information. The net puts the consumer in the driver's seat but also forces him or her to be more critical and thoughtful when reading.