Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

I certainly hope not, there are a lot of great comments above that read as both honest and smart.

I'm usually very critical of Google for other reasons (privacy, android etc.) but I don't see them at fault in this case, at least not of being voluntarily racist. Their algorithms "evolution" is based on what people searches and find useful, which means if say someone clicks on a link and stops searching for a while it could mean the user found what he/she was looking for. Now if thousands of people search for "black girls", the search returns say some porn links among others and most users click on them, could we expect the algorithms to ignore porn or rather to slowly adapt to what most users considered the right result?

The other points look also valid to me, but again, I don't see why Google should be labeled racist when their engine adapts to what news sources publish. Somewhere in the code there could be an association like 3 teens -> gang and a piece of code skimming news sources that reacts to all articles containing the word "gang"; now just mix the two and what you get? Just try searching for "gang" and look at the colors predominance. Search engines aren't easy to write. If I was an Eiffel language expert I would write a book titled "A tour on the Eiffel language" just to prove that. Try searching that phrase without getting submerged by images of the famous tower. Incidentally, a fun search for "a tour on the Eiffel schnitzel kraut" yielded about 90% food related results and only about 5% tower images although it still contained 100% of the terms for both, but having the word Eiffel not immediately following tour could mislead the search engine, so I changed it to "the tour Eiffel on a schnitzel kraut" and results slightly changed with more towers but also more unrelated stuff like Stonehenge.

To me a search engine should return results based on harsh reality if necessary, not church choir dreams; policing search engines results in pursuit of politically correctness would be very dangerous. We won't see that day, nor will our grand-grand-grand-grand-kids, but one day eventually racism will start vanishing from society by itself and search engines will follow, and/or we'll be socially mature enough to ignore anything that could resemble racism to a today's biased mind, giving it even less exposure.

Search for 'white man and white woman.' The reason I mention this is that the article implies this is some sort of result of social bias and stereotyping. As the result of that search shows (it's entirely interracial couples), it most certainly is not. No, it's a result of the fact that Google's search is not particularly smart. It's arguably the best there is, but it still comes down to correlating words to pages and that correlation is far from intelligent.

And as an aside, I think the term of bias in algorithms is misused when they are operating as intended. You'd call a poll biased if it implied it was polling group 'x', but did not actually do so due to some inadvertent bias. You wouldn't call it biased if it polled the group it stated it was going to poll and then gave the results - even if those results were not what you personally would want to see. If people are mostly searching for interracial couples when they search for 'white man and white woman' or they are mostly searching for porn when they search for 'black girls' then a biased algorithm would be one that actually returned white couples or non-pornographic results.

Without delving too deeply in to it, it seems google is reflecting existing biases society-wide.

This is problematic in the same way as facebook’s echo chamber effect, that it can cause a feedback loop that reinforces and heightens bias and division.

Beyond that though, I think it gets gnarly how much we want Google to fix the world by tweaking their algorithms. We obviously want something thoughtful. At the same time I don’t think we should lay all the world’s problems at google’s feet.