Tech Review

I love Google and use many of its products including the Android OS in my Motorola Droid, Reader, Docs, Analytics, Adsense, and Sites. Not that a slight tilt would make me leave Google, but I thought it'd be interesting to see how the company leans, politically.

Their homepage cartoons are mostly innocuous middle-of-the-road fare, and some of the demands- a 9/11 pic, Christ on Christmas- go against its policy against religion and politics, I think. They did feature an image of that new monkey-like fossil, which some people take as anti-religious as evidenced by those Darwin car stickers (religion gives avowed atheists' lives meaning). Still, no big deal.

I decided to see their feed recommendations for Reader.

News:

BBC News - World Edition
Google News
L.A. Times - California | Local News
Breaking News
LAist
New York Times
The Orange County Register: Homepage
LA Observed
Guardian.co.uk

The OC Register is there. Fox is a notable omission. They picked the liberal UK paper.

Politics:

Daily Kos
Talking Points Memo
The Politico
Wonkette
Think Progress
washingtonpost.com - Politics
Eschaton

Foul! No Corner, AmSpec, Powerline? Weirdly, the politics section has less entries than the knitting feeds.

The Catholic blogs are all faithful to Rome. Good. The philosophy and "Thinkers" feed groups don't have too much of a bias except for Salon (they don't come to mind first when I hear "thinkers;" the last article I saw there was a woman struggling with an impotent husband). There's a Theology group. I learned that smart people don't talk about movies, but "film."

Google blocks conservative sites concerned about homosexual curriculum in school, like Massresistance.

So, just a slight bias. Could be much worse, and to that, I'm grateful. Why isn't it worse? Well, there's this reality slap, experienced during Google's infancy:

Both Brin and Page [Google's founders] had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text ads.