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Try searching for "American inventors" or "American scientists" on Google and tell me if you notice anything odd.
by yostrovs 8y ago
Try searching for "American inventors" or "American scientists" on Google and tell me if you notice anything odd.
- tango24 8y agoWhat is your suspicion here?
- rory 8y agoI think the poster's referring to the overrepresentation of black scientists in that result, implying political motivation. It's pretty clear that it's just an artifact of the collision with the common search term "african american scientists". The result for "united states scientists" more or less proves this to be the case.
- autokad 8y agoby "overrepresentation of black scientists", in my case it means 100%.
- rory 8y agoHuh I see Einstein and Feynman in the top few results. Again, if you just switch the term to start with "united states" there are literally zero black people in the top results so seems unlikely it's a conspiracy.
- autokad 8y agoI doubt it is, but I also don't fault someone for thinking so. Einstein showed up after 3 scrolls. For me, "there are literally zero black", was not true. predominately not black, but Washington was in the list. I don't mean to be pedantic, but I take 'literally' seriously
- rory 8y agoI meant zero before scrolling. Einstein and Feynman show up before scrolling at positions six and seven when I search "american scientists" and the other results are black american scientists of one field or another. No black people show up before scrolling when I search "united states scientists". I guess results vary by geography or history or something.
- asdkhadsj 8y agoSame
- dragonwriter 8y ago> I think the poster's referring to the overrepresentation of black scientists in that result I don't think there is any overrepresentation in the result set, though there does seem to be a small cluster at the top (the top 5 and 9 of the first 12, but then a sudden drought.)
- fortomorrow 8y agoHmm I'm not so certain about that. US inventors returns 5 out of the top 10. They are George Washinton Carver, Elijah McCoy, Madam CJ Walker, Lewis Howard Latimer, and Garrett Morgan How many of those do you suppose are actually in the "Top 10" of US inventors
- afshin 8y agoThe first ten inventors I see when I search for "US inventors" are: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Morse, Eli Whitney, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Charles Goodyear, Lewis Howard Latimer, Henry Ford, George Eastman ... which does corroborate OP's "American inventors" hypothesis.
- fortomorrow 8y agoIf by OP you mean yosrtovs then yes youre correct, if not your results are different than the Google results i have on two different browsers as yours seems to be missing Elijah McCoy and Madam Walker. Even if only 3 out of the 10 were black as you posture its still a statistical over representation
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- michaelmrose 8y agoFirst off I think you searched for American Inventors not US inventors which seems to collide with African American because engineers are smart but computers are stupid. Secondly google search results are a best guess based on prior search history and other data about you about what you want to read right now given a term. You wont anywhere find a universal fact about what google themselves thinks about anything without reading material written BY google and not generated results from its search engine.
- fortomorrow 8y agoNo the search term was and is US inventors it was not a typo and done in incognito on two separate machines but thanks for the down vote
- bepotts 8y agoI think this is correct. If you Google search "African American Scientists" and "African American inventors", you get almost the exact same photo list as "American Scientists" and "American inventors".
- pacerwpg 8y agoI don't see anything odd. I see a lot of American scientists and inventors.
- dagenix 8y agoWould you care to further explain your point and how that relates to the article at all? Bonus points if you can do it without saying something racist or already debunked.
- ramblerman 8y agoI would wager it's not the default list resulting from their algorithms, and was in fact explicitly manipulated to present the list you see now. The original article claims something similar albeit on a different search result. the underlying idea is that google is not just using pagerank and algorithms to show us the current state of the internet. But rather is adding their own bias to push up / down certain results.
- asdkhadsj 8y ago> the underlying idea is that google is not just using pagerank and algorithms to show us the current state of the internet. But rather is adding their own bias to push up / down certain results. One thing I've wondered with stuff like this is why we assume Google is the root cause here. Mind you, I've switched all my products away from Google, so I'm not defending them, BUT; Reddit users frequently take part in manipulating Google search results for the sakes of memes. To put someones picture up on a specific search, for example. Yet other search results we believe to be hand crafted by Google. Now, I think it is more likely that Google is manipulating data here. However, I never see it discussed why we don't think someone else could be manipulating it?
- dagenix 8y agoAn idea for which absolutely no proof is offered. "Im seeing what I consider to be an insufficient number of white people" does not prove or provide evidence that the results were either hand curated or created with some sort of nefarious purpose.
- ramblerman 8y ago> "insufficient number of white people" That is unfair. This result is very different from a search like "USA inventors" which is semantically similar and it is an interesting discussion to have, why that is. I make no claims about what the results 'should' look like from a societal perspective. And ultimately I agree with your criticism, it was too hasty on my part to claim google did this purposefully. Some of the ideas in the sibling threads offer very plausible alternative reasons which could have caused this difference.
- cocacola1 8y agoI'm seeing a bunch of scientists and inventors.
- patorjk 8y agoI'll admit, that does seem a bit odd. Everyone else is playing dumb, but they're being disingenuous. From what I see, on both lists, there's only 1 white male in the first 10 results, and in both cases they're not in the top 5. It certainly looks like a curated list and they've gone out of their way to make sure there's representation for a wide array of people. Is this bad? Should they have done something different? I don't know. I guess it comes down to what you expect when you search for those terms, who is searching for those terms, and if these lists have proven to be helpful to those searching for these terms.
- michaelmrose 8y agoEveryone else isn't playing dumb Trump is just living it. As someone else already insightfully said results for American Scientists results a result set an awful lot like African American Scientists whereas US scientists or United States Scientists returns a results set more like you would expect. In 2015 google photos was classifying black people as Gorillas that wasn't on purpose either. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
- patorjk 8y ago> Everyone else isn't playing dumb Trump is just living it. Trump is just living it? Why did you add that part? I pointed out that the results looked odd. When I opened up the comment section, every other comment was saying nothing was odd. Those comments you're referring to didn't exist yet. Now that I've seen them, yes, they do bring up an interesting point. I'm not a Trump supporter. I'm not a republican. And nothing I said indicated that Google was out to get conservatives. There was no reason to bring up the Google image story or say anything about Trump in your reply.
- michaelmrose 8y agoThe title of the story is "Google Attacked by Trump With Claim It Is Burying Conservative News" I was referring to the subject of the entire discussion not you or your politics. I was trying to be clever by replying to your statement AND the topic simultaneously. Google images misclassifying black people as gorillas, as well as google instant answers providing erroneous and prejudicial information are examples of situations in which we could discover meaning where none exists in data generated by an algorithm. It seems vastly more likely that the words american inventors appears many times in documents that begin african american inventors than google specifically tweaking that query to increase diversity the same way I don't think google meant to convey that black people were like gorillas or that Obama was king of America
- michaelmrose 8y agoGoogle isn't an oracle of truth its a best guess at what you want to read given a search term. Wherein they try to provide actual answers to questions more complicated than 2+2 or what is the weather like they have ended up with interesting results drawn from the nonsense that is the internet. "Instant answers have attracted criticism for years. In 2014, Google results highlighted a Breitbart story saying Barack Obama was the king of America, and the next year, Google got flak for providing an excerpt from a creationist website saying dinosaurs were tools of indoctrination in response to the question, "What happened to dinosaurs?" Conspiracy-mongering instant answers drew attention in March after the website Search Engine Land pointed out that Googling "Is Obama planning a coup?" displayed an answer from a website called SECRETS OF THE FED saying Obama was indeed planning a coup with the help of "the communist Chinese." https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/google-instant-answers-problems-wrong-conspiracies-12366758.php https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/google-instant-ans... Imputing bias from search results may be a mistake. Especially when in some cases it might even be a correct guess at what the searcher actually wanted to read.
- brianbreslin 8y agothis got me curious and i found this post about this: http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-inventors/ http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-i...
- closetohome 8y agoYou found an alt-right blog complaining about a glitch in an algorithm that accidentally promoted afraican americans? Shocking.
- DuskStar 8y agoIn all seriousness, are we not allowed to complain about glitches now, particularly if the glitch means 'increased diversity'?
- lotu 8y agoIt is called understanding context. This isn’t a thread about weird tech glitches it is a thread about Donald Trump accusing Google of liberal bias; something that apprentlly involves showing more black people than neccassary in search results. If you lay out the game theory brining this up in this context you are implying that this is part of some vast liberal conspiracy. That is the problem.
- DuskStar 8y agoWell, that's a slightly different question. If the article is on Trump claiming that Google politically biases search results, Google having a history of returning suboptimal results in a way that is "stereotypically liberal" would be some decent supporting evidence - someone having done something before increases the prior probability of them having done so again. If that's actually accurate, of course. Now, it seems pretty clear to me that this was a bug (and one I see in other, non-political search results) and that lowers the credibility of the criticism. I'd still rather have both sides make their strongest arguments though, and that includes pointing out prior occurrences that might suggest a pattern.
- yongjik 8y agoIt has a plausible explanation. People searching for Oppenheimer or Gell-Mann don't type "American scientists", they just type "Oppenheimer" and "Gell-Mann". And a website talking about Oppenheimer doesn't spend much time about his being American---after all, that might be the least interesting fact about Oppenheimer's life. OTOH, I'll bet there are websites that talk about, say, "George Washington Carver, an American scientist you have never heard about." That said, the quality of curation seems rather poor.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ABCLAW 8y agoTry searching for "USA inventors". Oddly, when your search isn't a substring of "African American Inventors" you don't get weird results. It's almost like the search algo isn't perfect.
- scratchnsniff 8y agoSearch "American inventors" with the quotes and you'll get what you're looking for. Without the quotes you have to assess each word individually and with order independence. The "American" portion of the search phrase will result in a higher connected relevancy for "American inventors" who are also "African American" due to their shared keyword space. This is also probably why you're not seeing similar results when trying to repeat the experiment for other countries.
- FilterSweep 8y agoIf you were to take Google’s “organic results” to heart this would be largely explained by the greater number of people (from all political slants) seeking out AA inventors for the sake of their online disputes. Furthermore, to be honest, this “organic” search has largely been used to debunk racist claims. And the search has been used for over a decade.