WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 17859251

(no title)

jiojfdsal3 | 7 years ago

To me, this is a strong sign of Google manipulating search results.

https://www.google.com/search?q=american+inventors

https://www.google.com/search?q=american+mathematicians

https://www.google.com/search?q=american+scientists

Image results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=european+art+history&tbm=isc...

https://www.google.com/search?q=white+couple&tbm=isch

https://www.google.com/search?q=white+inventor&tbm=isch

discuss

order

erulabs|7 years ago

Or it's extremely basic text matching and "African American Inventors" more closely matches "American Inventors" (as it is an exact substring match) than web pages about "Inventors from the United States", which is probably a more common phrasing (see: https://www.google.com/search?q=Inventors+from+the+United+St...)

One of the biggest problems with Google as I see it, and facebook for that matter, is for the end user there isn't much of a way to introspect _why_ a search result comes from a particular query. In this case, you used that lack of information to confirm your own assumptions and bias.

jamie_ca|7 years ago

Yeah, try "US inventors" and the list of faces at the top you need to get to #9 before they're not white males.

jiojfdsal3|7 years ago

I'd assume the greatest search engineers in the world would know how to distinguish people searching between the two phrases.

creaghpatr|7 years ago

I think OPs point is somewhat corroborated by the choices of Google Doodle, both in who they select and who they omit.

notafraudster|7 years ago

Literally the first result in that search is a far-right, white nationalist blogger alleging Google is manipulating results for that search.

This would seem to both belie the claim that it is manipulating the results -- by virtue of the fact that wouldn't the first thing they manipulate away be this very criticism -- and seriously taint the chain of events that led you to claim that they are.

seren|7 years ago

Could be a bug. If you look at wikipedia for a category american inventors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_inventors

There is a sub category called "African American inventors". Since the sub category also match the search terms, it is possible that for some reason they are displayed in priority.

edit : the post of econ4all about "us+inventor" tend to confirm that it is an issue with "american" being part of "african american"

tdb7893|7 years ago

Also there's the fact that lists of famous African Americans are probably more common than general lists of famous Americans (and many will appear on both lists). The bias here seems pretty obviously to align with a general bias to what people put on the Internet. The funny thing about the position they are in is that there is no way to make everyone happy seeing as there doesn't seem an objective way to judge bias so it's inherently subjective.

gowld|7 years ago

What does "manipulating" mean? Are search results a naturally occuring substance that springs into your brower unless humans interfere?

Yoric|7 years ago

Well, it looks like it's taken straight from Wikipedia...

wyldfire|7 years ago

It's possible that the bias is from the corpus Google is indexing and not in the algorithm used to index the corpus.

mudil|7 years ago

Haha! This is hilarious!