Google denies Trump's claim that it's meddling with search results

Google has been forced to counter President Trump's latest accusations of conspiracy, with the US leader claiming the search engine was "rigged" against politically conservative viewpoints. In a series of his trademark early-morning tweets, the President said it was "a very serious situation".

The early-rising president didn't explain exactly what his government intended to do, but the 96% figure apparently comes from a blog post on a website called PJ Media, which was subsequently discussed on Trump favourite Fox News.

Google denied the charge, saying that its search results weren't skewed by politics. "When users type queries into the Google search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology."

"Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users' queries," the statement continued. "We continually work to improve Google search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."

The rant at tech companies such as Google follows high-profile conspiracy theorist Alex Jones being booted from a wider range of web platforms. Trump also went on a similar tirade against Twitter last month, accusing the social media platform of "shadow banning" prominent conservatives. Twitter, like Google, denied artificially tampering with its systems in pursuit of political goals.