Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

What did she expect for "professor style"? If I were hand-delivering results and knew it was from a black, asian, or white person in the US, why would I return different results? Someone entering a general query like that probably wants what the common interpretation is. Which is not going to be a black professor. Searching "professor style for black women" returns the results she presumably thinks should be the default for her.

As much as I hate Google, they seem to be delivering exactly what they should. Their job isn't to try to change people's minds, it is to find what they are looking for. What's next? Search for "geek guy" and it's all white. Should we be upset? Someone searching for "geek guy" is probably looking for exactly what Google returns in this case and all the others she highlights.

As far as "black girls"... What kind of results are people expecting? Who is actually searching for black girls? Probably people looking for porn... Why should Google return suboptimal results because you got offended?

Same for "three black teens". It's not Google's fault that so much news is reporting on crime committed containing that phrase. Did she actually check crime statistics? Maybe "three black teens" get mugshots and commit crimes together at a vastly higher rate than "three white teens". Outside of porn, who is searching for this phrase? If you want "clean" and friendly results, try searching "stock photo three black teens".

If anything, this article shows that Google's personalization should detect people that want to search things (that they wouldn't really search for in earnest) in order to be offended then display poor quality results to avoid this "issue".

In truth though, I would imagine that if she and other black women often searched "professor style" then didn't click any results and immediately searched for "professor style for black women" then Google would pick up on their results being suboptimal and change. My guess is that no one actually makes these searches outside of making a political point, so personalization cannot fix it.

Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way.

In reality though, the world is a complex place and the ideal pretend version can only be implemented in a carefully controlled environment such as a movie, a theatrical presentation, a video game or a situation where all participants agree to or are pressured into behaving in a way in which that pretend world is real. When the rest of the world leaks in, it is impossible to maintain that pressure on everyone.

About the best we have so far is "safe search" since pornography and obscenity follow fairly regular patterns. Political correctness though is constantly evolving and requires a trained academic to determine if each piece of information should be censored or allowed. Ideally in the future we'll have google glass and advanced AI classifiers constantly scanning our vision and providing us with tape delayed audio of the outside world in order to present the world to us and filter any politically incorrect content 24/7.

For now we have to do it ourselves and ignore any inconvenient facts that may make maintaining the illusion difficult. This constant struggle to deal with cognitive dissonance can be tiresome and one should restrict oneself to heavily moderated news feeds and not using search features for now. To create the carefully controlled virtual world in an interface to the rest of the world such as Google is an overwhelming task because you would need a highly sophisticated trained AI agent to maintain that illusion and to even invent information, such as lists of Nobel award winners from disadvantaged peoples, in order to maintain the illusion.

If Google's human inputs have racial bias that is certainly something that should be fixed. DuckDuckGo has safe search on by default.

> That a query for an innocent term such as 'black girls' even with 'safe search off' should not result in a bunch of porn.

I don't know what results the search term 'black girls' should return. If you just search for it, it doesn't return any porn for me. If you're seeing porn, your search results make reflect your search history since Google will customize your results based on your search history. Interesting.

That being said, it should return whatever people are searching for. We must be careful not to cross the line from fixing mistakes to politically correct moral censorship.

I think it's possible we're actually in violent agreement due, in part, to our different result set from Google. Even "incognito mode" doesn't return for me the set of salacious results reported by the author.

My takeaway was that algorithmic solutions alone will never be enough since they operate at the core on user intent.

Males searching for “FOOBAR girls” have, on average, different intent than women. If they represent the majority of searches, algorithms will naturally weigh the results they click more highly.

Hyper personalization is seen as an answer, but comes with the downside of a reinforcing bubble and drift to extremes. Human intervention and editing are only a partial solution, bringing up further questions about censorship and which ideology is correct.

No easy answers to all of this.