Challenging Google Search filter bubbles in social and political information: Disconforming evidence from a digital methods case study

This article engages in the debate on supposed online ‘filter bubbles’ by analysing a panel of Google users’ search results on a standardized set of socio-politically themed search queries. In general, the query results appear to be dominated by mainstream media sources, followed at a large distance by civil society and government resources. By means of mixed model regression analyses, with the prominence of different source types in the search results as dependent variables, it was tested whether search results vary across Google Search users. The results indicate that the inclusion of participants as a random effect does not explain variance when controlling for the different query keywords and the time at which the queries were ran. Hence, this study does not support the occurrence of ‘filter bubbles’ in Google Search results in the context of social and political information.