SearchDay - Are Search Engines Biased? - 11 March 2002
Can you trust search engines to deliver only fair and objective results? Maybe not, say the authors of a study seeking to measure how bias creeps in to search engineering.

If we ask a reference librarian a question, we take it for granted that we'll be offered unbiased help. Librarians know not only how to find information, but how to assess its quality and authority.

Most of us assume the same is true with search engines. Putting aside the issue of paid placement (aka advertising) links that appear in most search results these days, we want to believe that calculated or computed search results are fair, authoritative, and free from bias.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0311-sebias.html